GlassFish v2.1.1 is out (Sun Distro, Community Distro). GFv2.1.1 is the foundation for SailFin v2 and includes refinements on Replication and Failure detection plus many (>200) bug fixes and other improvements. See Shreedhar' s Overview, Kevin's post, the Wiki page and PR @Oracle OpenWorld. GFv2.1.1 also includes OpenMQ 4.4, Grizzly 1.0.30 (changes), Jersey 1.0.3 (changes), Shoal 1.1 (changes) and JSF 1.2_13. The bulk of the changes are from the GF repository (changes).

The commercial offering is via the GlassFish Portfolio. Note that GFv2.1.1 is also a patch for earlier releases (GFv2.1, itself a patch for GFv2U2) but the patch has not yet published at SunSolve. I'll post an entry at GlassFishForBusiness when it becomes available.

Jersey 1.1.1-ea (see Announcement) is now available at the GlassFish.org DEV Update Center repository. This means you can update your GlassFish to this development module with a couple of clicks. Follow the same instructions as for the latest Mojarra/JSF to discover and install the module; see our previous post for details.

The Update Center technology and repositories leverage IPS and GFv3's modularity (built on OSGi) to make updates, upgrades and additions very easy. The technology supports multiple repositories, local, intra-net, or remote and can be used not just to deliver updates to GlassFish but also all sorts of functionality on it, from Sun, its partners, your partners, your group, your IT shop, etc...

This is a significant change to the way we currently address these tasks and we are still improving all the pieces of this chain. I'm considering organizing a couple of online webinars on the topic later in the summer to get more details out but also to get your feedback and do some additional brainstorming.

Paul has announced the availability of Jersey 1.1.1 EA, based on the draft for JAX-RS 1.1 (see JAX-RS 1.0 spec and Changelog). To learn more about Jersey you can see the Getting Started Document and the Jersey User's Guide, check out Paul and Marc's Webinar, or browse through previous entries. Jersey is also collaborating with JFA's Atmosphere framework, and, since Paul is a fan of Scala, also supports Lift. Overall, very good movement towards GFv3. More details at Paul's announcement.

The 10th FISL starts this week. Like previous years, it looks like a lot of fun: the Program is full of good content, and there is also Porto Alegre... FISL starts on the 24th and it is preceded by Javali, an event focused on Java, on the 23rd (Agenda).

I did a quick pass through the FISL program to highlight some sessions, including those related to GlassFish Projects and friends:

• Arun on GF, MySQL and NetBeans (S205) (Arun's note)
• Mauricio on OSGi in GFv3 (S736)
• Ludo will talk about OpenDS (S473) (Ludo's note)
• Fabiane on Hudson (S733)
• Pat on OpenSSO (S360) (Pat's note)
• Fabio Veloso on Jersey (S282)

Other talks related to GlassFish include

• On OpenJDK, Bruno (S734) and Charlie (S226)
• On OpenSolaris Rafael (S600) and Brian (S749)
• On NetBeans et al, Geertjan (S735), and
• On OSS, Simon (S757),

I wish I was there! If you attend FISL or Javali, please report back.

Since we announced the Atmosphere project (and it's Comet Portable Runtime), Jean-Francois has been making steady progress. In his latest blog post he discusses how the new atmosphere-core now builds on top of Jersey.

Jean-Francois details the combined use of JAX-RS and Atmosphere annotations and offers complete source code to his chat demo. If you're in a hurry, here's a small code snippet :

@Suspend // the returned String will be written and then response suspended
@GET
@Produces("text/html")
public String cometGet() { ... }

It's always nice to see collaboration between different open source projects (Grizzly has long been a recommended way to deploy Jersey resources), even if these two projects happen to be under the GlassFish umbrella. Both Jean-Francois and Paul Sandoz (Jersey lead) will be discussing future developments at the JavaOne Atmosphere BOF on Tuesday @ 8h30pm.

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.

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.

Paul has published a very detailed Enterprise Tip showing how to use Jersey, the JAX-RS implementation used in GlassFish, together with Spring, the framework for building and running enterprise Java applications. The integration relies on Integration Features that are currently available in the stable versions of Jersey. Paul's note explains in full detail how to take a basic Web Application written with Jersey so it leverages Spring. Check it out!.

Paul is announcing the release of Jersey 1.0.3, an update to the open source, production-quality JAX-RS reference implementation. You can download it today or, if you're using GlassFish, simply wait a little bit for it to appear on your GlassFish Update center (both v2 and v3). New features include Guice 2.0 integration, developer-defined WADL-based resource classes, building on Grizzly 1.9.8, integrated use of MIMEPull, EJB Session beans as resources, improvements to the client API, new samples, more documentation and a new test framework. Check Paul's blog entry for details and proper community attributions.

If you're looking for a list of Jersey-specific features (vs. what the JAX-RS specification mandates), check this post. The team is now en route to Java EE 6 with an upcoming implementation to JAX-RS 1.1.

The GlassFish Mobility Platform 1.1 was announced ([1], [2]) at the same time as the GlassFish Portolio, although it is not formally part of the Portfolio. That week I hosted a couple of Webinars; you can check the archive pages for the Short and Long webinars.

The core of the functionality in GF MP 1.1 remains the SyncML engine and the adaptors but this release adds support for JAX-RS-based connectors (via Jersey) and JerseyMe, a JAX-RS client library for CLDC. Other additions include BlackBerry support and a new SalesForce sample that uses the JAX-RS connectors.

The team has been aggregating news on these features using the new Mobility Blog; doing a quick pass to catch up...

• Rebecca explains how to use the new JAX-RS Connector in a SalesForce example: [1], [2] and [3]. • Two short screencasts by Santiago showing how to Develop and Deploy JAX-RS Connectors. • Hans explains how to Provision BlackBerry clients. • A couple of screencasts by Ryan: SalesForce Example and Case Management System. • Rajiv Konkimalla shows how to Synchronize Twitter Data. • Joe Wang explains how to Develop a Client Application using LWUIT and a BlackBerry.

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 :-)

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.

A quick update on Jersey (the REST implementation in GlassFish) to complement yesterday's note on Metro, the SOAP stack.

Jersey 1.0.2 was released on Feb 12th. The release is still based on JAX-RS 1.0, has many bug fixes and new functionality including improved JSON support, resource-specific filters, Apache Abdera support, implicit produces and servlet as a filter. Check Paul's writeup for more details, and the team is already working on Jersey 1.0.3 - see Roadmap.

On a related topic, check Jakub's article on Consuming RESTful Web Services With the Jersey Client API. Finally, JAX-RS is also being used in the GlassFish Mobility Platform; spotlight still to be posted.

Metro, the Web Services stack, is one of the main components in GlassFish. One of its key benefits is excellent WebServices interoperability with the Microsoft stack, leveraging our relationship with MS. A consequence is showings in informal publications from Microsoft, like mszCool's Plans for 2009 and Identity Interoperability as well as in formal Federated Identity and Healthcare in the MS's The Architecture Journal. On a related note, O'Reilly has published Java Web Services: Up and Running - A quick, practical, and thorough introduction where Martin Kalin covers SOAP and RESTful Web Services in Java using Metro and Jersey.

For WebServices discussions, check out our Forum, and the mailing lists USERS@Metro and USERS@Jersey. Although we consider Jersey a piece of Metro - we love SOAP and REST equally :-) and the two parts are intended to mesh together - we are maintaining two mailing lists as the audiences tend to be disjoint.

Jakub has posted a sample for how to use the client API for Jersey and has used the REST interface to SmugMug as an example. Check out Jakub's writeup, Paul's Original Blog and the JavaDoc.

Other posts on the topic are tagged as jersey. Also check the slides, screencasts and recordings of Paul and Marc's webinar on Jersey and JAX-RS.