Today is Nov 21th, 2009. News shorts of interest to our communities, including: New date for EU review of Oracle/Sun acquisition, getting closer to v3 fcs, new OpenESB and OpenDS releases, Devoxx whiteboards, new customers and japanese event, and more.

Waiting for Godot
I read Waiting for Godot for HS, but I didn't expect to live it...

• E.U. Takes More Time to Review Oracle-Sun Deal

On the Road to GlassFish v3
We are getting very close. The buzz around JavaEE 6 and GFv3 at #devoxx was very positive; some more links:

• Migrating your Apps to JavaEE 6 (Wouter van Reeven)
• Adam Bien on
  • Adoption of EJB and JavaEE, Ready for Production and ... (it is) a massive rewrite.
  • Also see Adam's JavaEE Patterns and Best Practices @ Kenai, all based on GF.

New Releases
Final and Release Candidates releases:

• OpenDS 2.2.0 Release Candidate 3 is now available
• DSEE 7 Download, Documentation and Upgrade Guide Available Today
• JavaCAPS 6.2 is now available (ontherecord, webpage) - Based on GlassFish 2.1p2 and OpenESB 2.1
• Fuji (OpenESB v3) Milestone 9 is now available - (Mark's note, Wiki page).

More Devoxx
Devoxx is over.  By all accounts, a successful show.

• Devoxx 2009 picassa album... with
  • Whiteboard pics - JVM, CI Tool, Persistence Layer, Build Tool, UI Framework
  • Hudson #1 in CI (113); next are TeamCity (31) and CruiseControl (30).
• Notes on Mark's jigsaw prezo (from Reinier Zwitserloot)

GlassFish Customers and Events
New customers; new events

• Mapion Co. Ltd, in Japan (chhandomay, customers) - Using GlassFish Enterprise Server, MySQL Cluster and more.
• Health Sciences South Carolina (ontherecord) - Using JavaCAPS 6 including GlassFish ESB, MDM, HL7, LifeRay and more.
• New event: Benefits of GlassFish and MySQL in Japanese (Dec 9th, 2009).  All events at GF Event Calendar.

Other News

• ICEfaces 2.0 is now available for download.
• State of OpenSource AppServers by Masoud Kalali
• The LHC is back online! (website, #LHC)

JSF 2.0 is arguably one of the most awaited update to the Java EE 6 specification. IceFaces, the well-known provider of Ajax-enabled JSF components, is now building its 2.0 version on top of the Ajax support now built into the JSF 2.0 specification. Co-specification lead Roger Kitain has a recent blog entry discussing how ICEFaces uses JSF 2.0 to send Ajax requests from the client and how it processes them on the server.

In other recent JSF news, Ryan Lubke discusses bookmark-ability in JSF 2.0 (with the reference Mojarra implementation). Previous entries regarding JSF 2.0 can be found using the jsf2 tag.

In a few days time you'll be able to use the Preview version of GlassFish v3 which supports JSF 2.0. The adventurous can grab a recent GlassFish v3 promoted build here.

Dan had previously made Seam work with GlassFish but he now has woven the changes back (with extra functionality) into the Seam Project. Thanks, Dan! Specially appreciated is the support for RH (JBoss 5/RichFaces) and non-RH technologies (GlassFish Server/ICEfaces). Also newsworthy is the First Beta of JSR299, with a promised Seam bridge.

Related Webinars and Blog Entries:
• Seam, WebBeans and GlassFish, Dan Allen, Nov 20th, 2009.
• Short intro to ICEfaces, Ted Goddard, Feb 10th, 2009.
• From Ajax Push to JSF 2.0: ICEfaces on GlassFish, Ted Goddard, March 12th, 2009.
• Entries tagged Seam, ICEfaces, JSF.
• Arun's TOTD-77

The presenter at tomorrow's webinar is Ted Goddard; he will detail how to write rich interface applications using Ajax and Comet using JSF and ICEfaces and will also describe how these relate to the new JSF 2.0 specification in JavaEE 6. Presentation at 11am US Pacific, at TheAquarium Channel. Full details (and recordings) at the Show Page.

ICEfaces is now in the GlassFish v2 Update Center, this includes the Ajax Push Server and several demos. Check out Ted's Announcement and also the previous report on JSF 2.0 early support. You can also check Ted's 10' Prezo from the Portfolio Launch.

If you are a Woodstock user you may have seen the announcement from November 3rd where the NetBeans team announced they would stop development of new features in Woodstock. The full context was provided in a subsequent event (Archive - check slide 11-13 in slide deck).

The outcome was that Sun would work on two fronts: adding support for FireFox 3 on Woodstock 4.2 and a partner-based strategy. On the first front, check today's email and this wiki page; on the second, today we are announcing a relationship with ICEfaces. Check: John's post, Migration page at ICEfaces and Migration Doc at NetBeans.

The ICEfaces NetBeans plugin can be obtained at ICEfaces.org or from the NB's Update Center, see under tools->plugins. And, as John says, stay tuned for more details in these areas.

Ted and ICEfaces team has put together a demo showcasing "AJAX Push" and SIP communication. The demo is about setting up a call between sip phones of two users from a web browser. The web page gets updated with the details of the users as soon as the sip phone is registered (or unregistered) with the demo SIP application in SailFin. The demo is packaged as a SipServlet archive (.sar) file and can be directly deployed into sailfin by dropping into the autodeploy directory. The full source code of the demo is available in the svn repository. There is also an one minute video podcast of the demo.

Examples of more converged applications on SailFin are available in the SailFin samples page and also here and here.

The JSF Matrix keeps a table of JSF component libraries (although the comments suggest it needs updating) and Ryan just published a short note pointing to it. Pretty much all the component libraries work with GlassFish (we cheat a bit, most of the AppServers are using Mojarra, our JSF implementation). Libraries explicitly mentioned by Ryan from those in the JSF Matrix include our own Woodstock, ICEfaces, Apache Trinidad, Apache Tomahawk, JBoss RichFaces and Blueprints. He also lists Mojarra Scales and Mannor'n Rock. We would like to make it easier for you to run any of these libraries in your GlassFish application; let us know if you discover problems and we will collaborate with the library owners to fix them.

Interesting Comet use-cases seem to be popping up on a regular basis. This time around IceFaces' Ted is showcasing the WebMC sample application to host a slide presentation over the internet. You can host your own infrastructure (maybe a great new feature for java.net) and check a demonstration here.

In the latest version of this fully-documented-but-not-yet-final software, the interesting part is the use of Grizzly Comet to scale to a very large number of connections without killing the server with threads (ARP at work here). Unfortunately, I don't believe Skype scales as well in the number of simultaneous connections. Does anyone have a suggestion for an alternate solution for a one-to-many broadcast? A streaming solution maybe...

Get the previous ICEfaces coverage here: [1], [2]

Since this previous post showing early work on integrating ICEFaces and GlassFish v2, version 1.6.1 of ICEFaces 1.6.1 was released with support for GlassFish v2 (see ICEfaces Deployment Instructions for SUN Glassfish V2). This time, Ted blogs about preliminary integration between ICEFaces' AJAX Bridge and Grizzly Comet, leveraging its asynchronous request processing (ARP) implementation to provide better scalability with many connected clients.

This requires pre-releases of both ICEFaces (1.7DR2) and GlassFish (v2.1ur1). Jean-François' related post explains how to integrate the more recent Grizzly 1.0.18 into GlassFish v2 in you do not wish to use a v2.1 UR1 promoted build.

Bit by bit, the GlassFish adoption is translating into more support from products, projects and companies. Ted (Mr. ICEfaces, one of the early AJAX companies) has a brief blog showing how to use ICEfaces on GlassFish v2 using JSF 1.2. The current instructions require an SVN checkout, but he promises that this will become ICEfaces 1.6. Check it out!