Alexis has a nice summary of the different GlassFish releases, explaining how to Choose the Right Release: GlassFish v2.1, GlassFish v3 Prelude or GlassFish v3 Preview. In a nutshell, v2.1 is for production deployments, v3 Preview is a beta for v3 final and v3 Prelude is/was a transitional release... ... but you want the full story, so check Alexis' Answers... ... or just ask Ask the Magic 8 Ball :-)

Grails 1.1 is available on the GlassFish v2 Update Center. Thanks to Vivek and the team for delivering on it, and to Alexis for the tip. Still working on making this available on the GFv3 Update Center; Alexis has started a series to help other groups contribute to the repository. Related entries are tagged Grails.

Last week Sun released the latest patch (commercial) release in the GFv2 family and I've updated the corresponding entries in GF for Business. The relationship can be depicted graphically as follows:

Note that GFv2.1 is also GFv2U2p6 and GFv2.1p1 is also GFv2U2p7. GFv2.1 is playing double-duty as we follow the Enterprise Support Model where we provide regular patches to our customers which we then incorporate in the next public release.

Additional links:

• GF v2 - Release Overview.
• GFv2.1 (aka GFv2U2p6) - Release Overview.
• GFv2.1p1 (aka GFv2U2p7) - Release Overview.
• JavaEE and GF SDKs and Java.Net - Public Downloads
• GlassFish Portfolio - Commercial Offering

Two news items for the cost of one: First an Announcement of the availability of NetBeans IDE 6.5.1. This is a minor release that bundles GlassFish v2.1 instead of GlassFish v2 and incorporates NB 6.5 Patches and other Bug fixes. Check out the Full Details, and then you can go to the Download Page.

The second is a call for participation in NB 6.7 NetCAT. NetBeans 6.7 (previously 7.0) is the release targeted for JavaOne; it recently released M2 (Download, Details) and its features include Ergonomic IDE and even better non-Java language support, including PHP, C/C++, Ruby/Rails and Groovy/Grails.

NB 6.7 follows NB 6.1 (Apr 08) and NB 6.5 (Nov 08)

In addition to our regular Thursday slot, Harpreet and Srikanth will present GlassFish v2.1 during an extra webinar this Tuesday, at 11am PT. GFv2.1 is the latest (announcement) release in the GFv2 family; with over 400 bug fixes (since GFv2UR2) GFv2.1 is the basis for SailFin and it is a recommended upgrade. Slides, other material and, later, recordings, will be posted to the Wiki Page; we encourage your participation during the presentation via the chat room.

Today we released GlassFish v2.1 and Sailfin 1.0. GlassFish v2.1 is the latest public release of our full featured Java EE AppServer and it includes significant stability and feature improvements. See Paul's announcement (Java.Net, MarkMail) for some details on the release and also check out the Comparison Table between v2 and v3. GlassFish v2.1 is the basis on which Sailfin builds our SIP-based open source Communications Server. See Srikanth's announcement (Java.Net, MarkMail) for some details. If you are interested in these releases, please pencil-in our Online Webinar for Feb 10th. Details, including speaker(s), when available.

John just posted a very nice screencast showing how to go From Zero to a v2 Cluster in 10 minutes, including download, asadmin configuration, GUI configuration, and tests. Pretty neat, check it out. Easy configuration of Clustering is one of the assets of GlassFish, and, as users move into production, the interest is growing. A couple of weeks ago I highlighted some Posts and Slides on Clustering and also uploaded slides to SLX and SlideShare and they have proven quite popular.

Given the interest, I have started collecting links for a Proposed Webinar Set on the topic; hopefully in January.

Clustering - supported in GlassFish since Sept 2007 - will be further improved in the GFv2.1 release (companion to SailFin). One of the improvements is Apache 2.2 support and Kshitiz has written an good writeup on the configuration steps and mentions the automated support also. Clustering is used for horizontal scalability and high availability; interest and use of the feature is increasing quickly with GlassFish deployments. Check the official documentation and our recent White Paper on HA. Also, Satyajit just put together a set of slides on the topic (writeup, PDF@SLX, SlideShare).

We will cover Clustering in a future TA Online event; the Seam Online Event on Thursday went very well and I think the new format with multiple, shorter, presentations around a single topic is well suited to this new medium.

With all the great things you hear about GlassFish v3 Prelude, you may wonder if this is the right tool for you to use and why a "Prelude" moniker is used here. The answer to lies into this pretty thorough comparison between GlassFish v2 and v3 Prelude. For instance, depending on which version of .Net WCF you want to interoperate with, or if full Java EE-compliance is required, this page will tell which GlassFish to use. Both are supported products.

Here's also more coverage following our launch last week :
• GlassFish v3 Prelude - Out Now! (Pat "OpenSSO" Patterson)
• Quick News: GlassFish v3 Prelude Released (The Virtual Machine)
• GlassFish v3 and Grails Support (The Virtual Machine)
• Java DB and GlassFish v3 Prelude (François "JavaDB" Orsini)
• Jaspersoft est certifié pour Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server (TooLinux)
• Sun veröffentlicht neue Vorschau auf Glassfish
• Sun dévoile la version 3 de son serveur d’applications Java GlassFish (Silicon.fr)
• Screencast #27: Simple Web Application using NetBeans 6.5 IDE and GlassFish v3 Prelude (Arun)
• Sun sort un prélude de GlassFish V3 (LeMagIT)
• Nouveau serveur GlassFish, certification Jaspersoft (Programmez.com)
• Prelude includes Portable, In-Memory JACC Provider (Ron)
• GlassFish v3 Prelude, Sun fait le Buzz (Xebia France - Revue de Presse)
• Modular Architecture Based on OSGi (The Cynical Turtle)
• OSGi in the Enterprise (InfoQ)
• Who support what with Comet or why GlassFish v3 Prelude is for you! (Jean-François "Comet" Arcand)

Project WebSynergy continues its march to its first commercial release early next year. Last Friday, the team released its Milestone 3 [download]. Major changes or additions since the last milestone include: GlassFish V2 & V3 bundles, much improved documentation, better samples, WSRP-Database integration, jBPM Workflow support, an OpenOffice plugin, Eclipse support, and tons of new features in Portal Pack in support of WebSynergy features. This will be the last Milestone before the upcoming commercial release.

Check out Rajesh on WSRP 2.0 (now part of the App Platform SDK), Jennifer on M3, and Siddesh on setting up WebSynergy with Oracle.

WebSynergy has enjoyed some positive press recently. David Heffelfinger wrote up a nice piece on WebSynergy and OpenPortal. Kristian on WebSynergy: portal development renewed. Last but not least, Sun was once again recognized as a Leader in Gartner's Portal Magic Quadrant. Also, don't miss GlassFish Day on Thursday. We'll be there!

There is a new patch release for GlassFish v2 (U2) available to commercial customers of GlassFish Enterprise Server (aka Sun Java System Application Server). This fourth patch addresses 11 new defects (cumulative of 58 since U2) plus provides updates to OpenMQ/JMQ and the Load Balancer.

For more details check: • GF Enterprise Support Model • GFv2 Family Overview • GFv2 U2 patch 4 Overview, Defect Lists, Links, etc • Subscriptions Site • GlassFish For Business blog

Project WebSynergy Stable Build 2 [download] is now available! This build represents a significant milestone for the team and establishes a lot of the groundwork for the future features. In addition, summer vacations and name searches have delayed us somewhat, but we are very close to getting the external community site established (see my detailed blog post for details). Future features include exposing more Presence features, authorization and identity-based content delivery via OpenSSO integration, expanded CMS features, and IPS/Update Center support (e.g.by making a v3 module). Development tools for WebSynergy are also rapidly evolving to track the latest features in WebSynergy: Portal Pack Milestone 1 for NetBeans 6.5 is now out. The project is shaping up to really be a revolution in Sun portal. Nice work!

It's time for another update on the various GlassFish releases roadmaps. Harpreet Singh has just posted a updated draft schedule for GlassFish v2.1, the next major public release of the v2 branch (as of this writing, the current public release is v2ur2).

While GlassFish v2.1 is scheduled to ship in its final version in December, the team is also working on the v3 branch and will actually ship the v3 prelude release (Roadmap) in a couple of months (we just passed code freeze).

Let's not forget to mention the "patch" releases for customers with a GlassFish subscription. GlassFish 2ur2 Patch 2 is the latest release there. You can follow these releases tailored for production usage on the GlassFishForBusiness. Finally, Sailfin V1 alpha shipped recently. This version is aligned with v2.1 mentioned at the beginning of this note.

A concise compilation of today's news of interest to TheAquarium readers:

GlassFish v2 U2 patch 2 is now available to Sun enterprise customers of Sun GlassFish Server. Check out the details at GlassFish For Business: • Sun's Commercial Support for GlassFish Server • Overview of GFv2 Releases • GF v2 U2 patch 1 (SJS AS 9.1 U2 patch 1) - First commercial patch release. • GF v2 U2 patch 2 (SJS AS 9.1 U2 patch 2) - Second commercial patch release.