The GlassFish web tier team is very active with releases and new features. Here's a quick set of links. JAX-WS spec and implementation lead Jitu announces the simultaneous releases of JAX-WS RI 2.1.7 and Metro 1.5 (Metro includes the JAX-WS implementation) and shares some of the new features and the list of bugs fixed. In this blog post Jean-François Arcand announces the availability of Grizzly 2.0 Milestone 1 and its main goals and shares a quick walk down memory lane on how the project evolved since its early days. Project lead Oleksiys goes into more details about the content of the release including an interesting strategy API for handling requests. Note that Grizzly 1.9.11 is the release integrated into GlassFish v3 (offering it a set of extension points).

Speaking of Grizzly, Jakub has an entry on using just GrizzlyWebServer 1.9.10 to serve both static and dynamic RESTful content with Jersey. Finally, in addition to the quite mature Comet implementation in Grizzly/GlassFish, Jean-François' Atmosphere framework (now running on Weblogic!), HTML 5 WebSockets may well be on the list of things coming up next.

Progress on both sets of Web Services specifications for JavaEE 6... On the RESTful side, Marc reports on a new specification draft. As usual, the JSR311 Website has full details including the Editors Draft and a Changelog. Marc points out there is still work pending in the integration with Servlet 3.0, EJB 3.1 and JSR 299. On the SOAP side, Rama announces a new implementation of the latest JAX-WS 2.2 Draft.

This week Harold gave the Metro Webinar, which is a good oppty to catch up with Metro news. There are two release families: GlassFish v2 and GF v3prelude uses the Metro 1.x releases while GlassFish v3 (post-prelude) will use Metro 2.0.

Fast Infoset is a standards-based binary encoding of XML that improves performance while decreasing payload size. The initial implementation in GlassFish was for JAX-RPC but later versions use the JAX-WS API and Oleksiys has recently published an entry describing how FI users can Migrate from JAX-RPC to JAX-WS. The latest implementation of FI is FI 1.2.2, available in Metro 1.1, which runs on the current (v2) version of GlassFish but will be bundled in GlassFish v2.1.

We recently realized that our "Web Services" page was pretty out of date. If you're new to Web Services in either Java EE 5 or in GlassFish and you are trying to make sense of Metro, JAX-WS, JAXB, WSIT, or Tango, the new version of that page is now available for you to find all about them.

You may also be interested in the list of Web Services Technical Articles and Tips. I find the Enterprise Tech Tips to be often very well written and straight to the point. Check them out and tell us what other topics you'd like to be covered.

As a follow-up to a previous nice JAX-WS presentation, Stijn Van den Enden's "JAX-WS, beyond the basics" presentation is now available from parleys.com. Stijn does a good job at explaining JAX-WS handlers, JAXB customization, Dispatch/Provider API (although his example may not feel RESTful to the JAX-RS crowd), some best practices and more in a very didactic and easy to follow presentation. Everything said and presented there applies to the Metro Web Services stack that is part of GlassFish v2 (btw, Stijn is reported to be a happy GlassFish user).

No wonder this is the best-rated program on Parleys.com. The only down side is that I don't see the PDF available on the web site anywhere...

In an Enterprise Tech Tip, Rama describes how to use the JAX-WS Maven plugin to develop Web services. The article describes why you may be interested in the  plugin: don't have to get the JAX-WS dependencies, set up the classpath, and configure and invoke the tool tasks for compilation and packaging -- steps required by the Ant tasks.

The different tooling options around Metro are described in an Earlier  Post.

You can also subscribe to the Tech Tips as an RSS feed.

Much like EJB interceptors, JAX-WS handlers (both SOAP and Logical) provide an elegant extension point to the developer. But that flexibility does come at a performance price since DOM is used to apply this handler logic.

In his latest entry, Rama explains how Metro takes advantage of the extensible Handler framework provided by the JAX-WS specification to provide Message-based handlers using a lightweight Tube.

This is all part of the upcoming Metro 1.1 release recently mentioned.

Rama reports that Java SE 6 Update N will not only please people waiting for the "Consumer JRE" but also Web Services developers. The much improved JAX-WS 2.1.1 implementation will also be part of the core JRE set of APIs. This will remove the need for the endorsed mechanism required today in order to use both JAX-WS 2.1 and Java 6.

JAX-WS RI no longer depends on the SAAJ RI. • Check Jitu's Announcement.   This is important because it simplifies running Metro in more containers, like WebSphere AppServer.

JAX-WS replaces JAX-RPC as an easy-to-use and feature-rich Web services specification. A high-performant and production-quality implementation of JAX-WS is already available in Metro. OpenPortal WSRP Project uses JAX-RPC for the Web services stack and started work in parallel to migrate to JAX-WS. The instructions to run the JAX-WS version are now available and cleanly classified in data binding, security, tools and deployment descriptors.

If you are also using JAX-RPC then you can learn from their JAX-RPC -> JAX-WS migration experience and use the great set of features in Metro.

Metro, the Web services stack in GlassFish, allows you to build secure, reliable, transactional, and interoperable Web services. NetBeans IDE provides an easy way to generate Web service client artifacts and invoke the endpoint from Java classes or pages. The beauty of Web services is that the client and server may be completely disconnected, for example, even using different language. James Ward showed how to use Flex to create a front end to JAX-WS, a core component of Metro.

Let us know if you have used JavaFX or any other similar technology to create a front end for Metro.

Jitu shows how to configure the JAX-WS RI (part of Metro) for compression. The server (running on a container) can do compression and decompression - Jitu shows how to configure Apache Tomcat and GlassFish. The client side (the JAX-WS implementation) will decode; all that is necessary is to add an appropriate Accept-Encoding header. Currently there is no encoding built into the client code, if you have a use case, please let Jitu know.

Check out Jitu's writeup for details. The functionality is also described in the JAX-WS Users Guide which is modeled after the JAXB Users Guide.

Thomas announced that JBossWS 2.1.0 will support Metro, the GlassFish WS Stack (Thomas' blog, Vivek's). Other uses include GF v2 (and SJS AS 9.1), TmaxSoft JEUS 6 and WebLogic Server 10. Metro is designed to be extensible and integrateable and also works on Jetty and Tomcat - I'd venture it should not be hard to use inside Geronimo, so let us know if you attempt that effort.

PS - The map shown is that of Barcelona's Metro. It does not include the future Linea 9.

The GlassFish Web Services stack (JAX-WS RI plus Project Tango and more) has seen very nice adoption through the GlassFish AppServer and via Tomcat, Jetty, and commercial products like WLS 10, Tmaxsoft's JEUS 6 and elsewhere. We think that a concise name and a consolidated download for the stack will enable even faster adoption so... we now have Project Metro. Check out the announcements from Arun, Harold and Kohsuke.

The old names (JAX-WS RI, Tango) do not go away, but we will start emphasizing the new name in future posts. And, before you ask, yes, Metro is a relatively common name in the web but the top hits do not have high page rank indices, so we hope that soon we will show close to the top in search results