The JCP Election Ballot is OPEN. There are ballots for "ratified" and "elected" seats on both the SE/EE and the ME Executive Committes.  These are very important positions - for example, they vote on all the key JSR events. Voting period is until midnight (PT) on Monday, November 2nd. If you are a JCP Member you can go vote through the online Ballot.

The elected seats candidates for JavaEE include Liferay, Matthew McCullough, Tim Peierls and Terracotta.  Ratification candidates are Doug Lea, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Oracle.  More information on the election process at the JCP Elections Page.

Abhijit has announced an update to the GlassFish v3 fcs schedule. We could not keep the previous date due to a black-out period at the JCP (EC elections) and moving the date forward proved to be unworkable for several reasons - including the current Java.Net problems - so we moved the date out by two weeks. New dates set the hard code freeze (HCF) date to Nov 9, 2009, with a final release by Dec 10. Full details at Schedule Page@Wiki.

The 2009 JCP Elections are here. The JCP has been trying to improve transparency with the new JSR 215 rules (JCP 2.7 MR); now it is your turn. Between now and Oct 14th you can nominate names for the two open seats (Java SE/EE and Java ME) here. Then, from Nov 20th til Oct 2nd, you can vote on the seats.

Check out the Call for votes and the Election Overview.

While the GlassFish Forum is a great place to ask all sorts of questions, it's nice to see users taking the time to document their findings on their blogs. Some recent examples include :

• "JAVA Security Provider Error" from Marc on getting the proper security provider when porting an application from JBoss to GlassFish. • "JEE Security - How to setup authentication on Glassfish and Netbeans", from Jair about Java EE security applied to GlassFish administration. • "Glassfish uriEncoding UTF-8" from Baiyun on encoding GET and POST parameters in GlassFish (either in domain.xml or in sun-web.xml).

Now I need to make sure this is all integrated into the GlassFish Wiki if not already covered. A centralized place for how-to's in addition to the GlassFish Documentation sounds like a reasonable thing to avoid relying on the accuracy of search engines.

It's been a while since the last GlassFish Podcast episode and even longer since the last interview, so here it goes - episode #36 an interview with Antonio Goncalves. Antonio Goncalves has many hats and this discussion covers a lot of ground starting with his recently published Java EE 6 book with GlassFish v3. It also covers his favorite Java EE 6 feature, his role in the JCP as an individual contributor, as the Paris JUG leader, his take on Spring vs. Java EE 6 and some thoughts on JSR 299. Enjoy the episode. iTunes users can find it here.

Java EE 6 will include JSR 330 and JSR 299. Roberto explains the changes: • JSR-299 will be updated to use the JSR-330 annotations • JSR-330 has evolved to take into account requirements from JSR-299 • Both JSRs will be part of the Java EE 6 Platform

Thanks to everybody that worked so hard to make these changes; obviously we wished this had happened earlier in the Java EE 6 cycle but the result will be an improved platform. We estimate that the final release of Java EE 6 (and GFv3) will be around November but we should have specific dates next week.

Check out Roberto's Announcement for details.

JSF 2.0 continues to show signs of good adoption in the enterprise world. From IBM's DeveloperWorks, David Geary has posted JSF 2 Fu, Part 3. And, from the other side, Andy Schwartz, Oracle's rep to JSR-314, has now published a very nice and complete What’s New in JSF 2?.

Other posts on this topic are tagged JSF2. An easy way to play with the technology is to download GlassFish v3 Preview and then Upgrade to the Latest Mojarra.

With JavaEE 6 due out very soon, we are moving into the final stages, including completing courses and certificates. Roberto is Asking for your Help to validate the content; please consider contributing to make these offerings as valuable as possible. When is "very soon"? Stay tuned for an schedule update.

The GlassFish v3 Preview release is now available. This is an Early Access release of Java EE 6 - Welcome to JavaOne 2009! Check out the Download Page. Also see the page on JavaEE 6 Standards, the Docs and Resources, the GFv3 Document Set, and the SDK Release Notes, and the GFv3 Release Notes.

The release comes in two bundles, corresponding to the JavaEE 6 Web Profile and the JavaEE 6 full specification. The size of the bundle varies depending on packaging and features but ranges from 40MB to 60MBs. Remember that you can start with the "small" release (i.e. web profile) and easily add the missing pieces via the integrated update center.

The Proposed Final Draft for Servlet 3.0 is now available from the official JSR 315 page. This is the version that will be implemented (*) in GlassFish v3 EA (aka as the JavaOne release). And, on the same topic, Shing Wai has a note explaining how web-fragment.xml works. This new feature is intended to provide pluggability of library jars.

(*) modulo bugs and (according to Rajiv) file upload.

The new (not yet published) Servlet 3.0 PFD also includes an expanded set of Security Annotations, to expand the existing annotations like @DeclareRoles and @RunAs with @DenyAll, @PermitAll, @RolesAllowed and @TransportProtected. Check Shing Wai Shing Wai's writeup for details.

I'll post when the actual Servlet 3.0 PFD document is available.

One release at a time, all the projects are getting ready for JavaOne... Paul announced the availability of Jersey 1.1.0 EA. It used to be that we had to remind people that it was possible to be the reference implementation and production ready; I think that is no longer necessary; the cumulative list of features for Jersey is very impressive, including APIs for Client, Server, Grizzly, WADL, JSON, Spring and Guice Integration, MIME Multipart, Apache HTTP Client, Apache Abdera, .... New for this release are improved EJB integration, better HTTPS with GlassFish and improved Scala integration.

The increased traffic in the USERS Mailing List shows the growing adoption. Check out Paul's Note for all details, and download the release using the information here, or wait a bit for its propagation to the update centers.

I recently noticed several new books based on GlassFish Server, like Yuli's book on Java EE and DBs, Using MySQL and GlassFish and Antonio's book on Java EE 6 with GF v3. Looking a bit more I also found that David also has a new book on NetBeans 6 and Java EE 5 (w/ GF) and Adam has one on the Netbeans 6 RCP that also uses GlassFish in many places.

Below is a quick table of the books I know (in random order); please (continue to) send me omissions and I will update it.

Added - Masoud's GlassFish in Action is in Early Access Edition.

Applications using the Spring framework have always been able to run happily in GlassFish, be it v2 or v3. Now with GlassFish v3 approaching a final release, new opportunities are coming along. In a follow-up to last week's entry on managed OSGi bundles, GlassFish architect Jerome Dochez takes it a little further by implementing the GlassFish service using Spring beans and invoking it using a Java EE 6 webapp. All with no OSGi or Spring dependency whatsoever. This detailed example uses Spring's extender bundle whose role is to target the Spring container for the Spring-based service implementation, and (this is what seems to me like the most interesting part), a simple web application that can simply inject this service with a standard @Resource annotation. Of course, this is no customized version of GlassFish and the service lookup uses OSGi services and a standard Java EE annotations. No GlassFish/Spring/OSGi API required. Powerful, yet very simple.

In his recent interview on OSGi interview JavaPosse.com, Peter Kriens (OSGi Director of Technology) mentions GlassFish v3 as an example of extending a runtime without using any API specific to that runtime. It's great to hear Peter likes the work done by the GlassFish v3 team!

One of the challenges in spec development is how to best leverage other specs that are being developed simultaneously, within the real-life constraints of schedules, resources, time-zones, etc. This is another situation where transparency and open-source is helping significantly - plus the usual hard work of the EGs. A case in point is EJB 3.1 and JAX-RS 1.1 where the EGs have been working to allow the use of POJO sesion beans as resource (root) or provider classes in Jersey, deployed as a plain WAR. This allows very natural Java programming, things like this root class

@Stateless @Path("ssb") public class StatelessSessionRootResource { @Context private UriInfo ui; @GET public String get() { return "GET: " + ui.getRequestUri().toASCIIString(); } }

Check out full details in Paul's Glassfish v3, EJB 3.1 and Jersey and in Ken's JAX-RS and EJB.

EJB3.1 and JAX-RS are two of the new JavaEE6 features you will be able to try GFv3 in EA by JavaOne - see you there! And the photo? Another great partnership, this one in Mixed Doubles in Badminton: Kim Dong-moon and Ra Kyung-min :-)