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)

A summary of today's news of interest to our communities. Today is Nov 19th, 2009. One more day to go at Devoxx, some Terracotta news and more GlassFish Events. The Java EE 6 specs are in voting right now, and we are still awaiting Godot. Note - this is an experiment to flush out the daily news that otherwise we can't cover due to limited time. Let us know how the format works for you.

Terracotta News

Bumped into Alex Miller's blog and it has several posts worth mentioning:

• Terracotta Acquires Quartz
• Terracotta, Ehcache, Hibernate, and more to come
• Terracotta Use Cases

Devoxx Updates

• Closures coming to JDK 7 - Samples from Cay;reactions from AlexM and StephenC.
• JDK 7 schedule extended til Sept 2010.
• Jigsaw downloads available
  • And, from last week see JDK 7 M5 and companion NB 6.8
• Hudson, the most used CI Solution at Devoxx (@rob2)
• Photos (from Picassa Album)- Happy faces: Roberto; Antonio and AlexisMP - one, two; Ludo.
• Danny's summaries on Day 1 and Day 2. Many, many tweets at #devoxx.

New GlassFish Events

• Added JSF Summit, Sao Paolo Tech Days and JSF Days 2010 to the GF Event Calendar.

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.

Mojarra 2.0, the production-quality, reference implementation for JSF 2.0 is out! Yet another step closer to v3 final. This will of course be part of GlassFish v3 later this year (with an integration planned as early as this week) but Maven and standalone are two other options to grab the bits. In his blog, Ryan lists a set of very good resources (mainly blog posts) on JSF 2.0. Earlier this year, Ryan authored a series of blogposts which were also very detailed and informative. He covers tools support (yes, it's coming very soon as Cay discusses for NetBeans in his latest blog post) and recognizes the numerous contributors to this major release.

Note also that while JSF 2.0 is set to be part of Java EE 6, it does not require a servlet 3.0 container. In the case of GlassFish v3.0, web.xml is optional and there is no longer the need to declare the Faces servlet (see Cay's entry on that as well).

Mojarra as an implementation of JSF 2.0 is the first one out but it is also set to be part of a number of coopetitor's. Finally, now is probably a good time to skim throught The Aquarium posts tagged with the jsf2 and mojarra keywords.

Added The latest release is Mojarra 2.0.1, see Jim's post.

I had forgotten how many frameworks are covered in the NetBeans set of quickstart documents; check out the list:

• Introduction to Developing Web Applications • Introduction to the Spring Framework • Introduction to the JavaServer Faces Framework • Introduction to the Struts Web Framework • Introduction to the Grails Web Framework • Introduction to the Wicket Web Framework

GlassFish v3 is scheduled to go final at the end of November and the builds are stabilizing quickly. Our test suites are very exhaustive but the only way to be sure that the final artifacts work for you is if you try them in your specific configuration. I was looking through the list and it made me think that FishCAT for GF v3 just completed its first week (See Judy's mail and report) and that team filed more than 20 bugs and more than half have already been fixed. so...

If you use one of the Java Frameworks, or your favorite app or framework, with the latest GF v3 builds and find issues, help us, and the rest of the community, by filing a bug. Thanks!

More JSF 2.0 samples: • Carol has converted the Pet Store to Use JSF 2.0, JavaEE6 and GFv3 preview, • Jim shows how to take a YUI calendar widget and integrate it in a JSF 2.0 page, • ... and then takes that widget and Moves it into a JSF Component.

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.

There is a new beta for Mojarra 2.0, the RI of JSF 2.0 (relnotes, news, downloads). Mojarra 2.0 is bundled in GlassFish v3 and the new release of Mojarra is included in recent Promoted Builds; an alternative is to use the Update Center and only update JSF.

The Update Crenter is accessed through an update tool; either the one bundled in the GlassFish console or the unbundled one. To do that, first ensure that you have http://pkg.glassfish.org/v3/dev as your preferred repository and then check on available updates. You will get a long list; you can then unselect all the components (using (Command-Modifier)-U on my mac) and then select JSF only. Then you just need to install the new packages.

Thanks to Jim for the tip. Ah!, also note that Mojarra can also be used in other containers; install and configure it manually.

There is a new project at Kenai: NBAppEngine. As the name suggests, this is intended to provide a NetBeans plugin for the Google AppEngine. Check the introductory writeups by Petr and Geertjan; check it out, and consider helping out. On a related topic, I noticed that Mojarra 1.2.13 now has "support" for Google AppEngine; see ChangeLog.

Now, if we could only get them to Support JPA Properly...

Cay is updating his Core JSF book and is taking WebBeans (JSR299) for a spin. His most recent post writes covers Conversation scope and access to stateful session beans from JSF pages. Cay used GlassFish v3 Preview (after updating to the latest JSF components); except for one example where he had to use JBoss 5.1.0 GA because we have not yet implemented some pieces of WebBeans. (see his comment about startup times :-)) Check out Cay's Note and you may also want to check Pete Muir's Webinar with SlideCast from May 19th.

Now that JSF 2.0 is Final and is is easily accessible in GFv3 Preview, it is a good time to learn more about it, so here is a set of useful links:

Also, all related TA entries are tagged JSF... And, please send us feedback on the spec or the implementation to help us with the Fit and Finish.

Three brief but important JCP news:

The JCP also approved additional transparency for JCP 2.7, which I believe is a very important part in running an Expert group for a number of reasons, including balancing the role of the EG lead.

The final news is the submission of JSR 330, Dependency Injection for Java. The relationship to JSR 299 is unclear to me at this point.

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.

JSR 314, JSF 2.0, is Now in Final Vote. To celebrate that, here is a pass through JSF 2.0 news:

• From Ed, the Slides and Feedback on his recent Online Webinar    (sorry, couldn't find the time to announce it). • From Jim, Redirecting from an Ajax Request and Ajax Events and Errors • From David Geary, Part I of an in-depth review of JSF 2.0.

Additional related entries are tagged JSF or JSF2.

Ryan's latest installement in his JSF 2.0 Preview series shows how to implement Custom Managed Beans through the new custom scope view and the managed-bean-scope element in faces-config.xml or via the @CustomScoped annotation.

The full series is:

• Part 1 - Packaging / Project Staging • Part 2.1 - Resources • Part 2.2 - Resource APIs • Part 2.3 - Resources and EL • Part 3 - Publish/Subscribe Event System • Part 4 - Resource Re-location • Part 5 - EDR1 Potpourri • Part 6 - Implicit Navigation • Part 7 - Custom Managed Beans (latest addition)

PS. The picture is that of the Tuxtla Statuette, which is from the La Mojarra; used here as Mojarra is the project name of the GlassFish JSF implementation.