This is the first of our weekly news catch-up and covers Nov 1 to Nov 11, 2009. This week the news catch-up is partial; next week I'll create the entry through the week and will try to be more comprehensive. This week we also cover old news on JRuby and OSGi.

GlassFish and Middleware News

• IBM DeveloperWorks: Introducing Metro. Nice to see IBM refering to the GlassFish WebServices implementation as it is Used by Many, including IBM. Incidentally, the article triggered several internal and external threads on the topic, see for example: Broken Fault Handling in Metro.
• Subversion is now an Apache Incubator podling and same for LibCloud (from Apache incubator)
• New IzPack, and new GlassFish v2.1.1 installer (via alexismp)
• Sun's Financial results for Q3FY2010 are now available. The revenue for MiddleWare+MySQL are shown as a single entry and are (slightly) up, Year-to-Year (Y/Y); Java and OpenStorage are significantly up Y/Y; other segments are down Y/Y. Also check the numbers for previous quarters.
• IntelliJ IDEA 9 (Maia) goes Beta with full JavaEE 6 (and GlassFish v3) suport.
• Sun's to cut 3000 jobs.
• New record month in GlassFish GeoMap numbers (more details still to come).

Predicting our Systems Future

• Systems-related: New DTrace CheatSheet, Simple LB in OpenSolaris
• Latest installment in Chris's series on Reduced Install of OpenSolaris. The series deserves a spotlight...
• Dedup in ZFS. This is a big deal; DeDup is big $$ business.

From the past: OSGi in GlassFish (triggered by this thread):

• Sahoo has done a lot of work on the OSGi portion of GF; see his blogs on: Running GlassFish on Equinox (and other OSGi Platforms), OSGi enabled web applications inGlassFish, Developing Hybrid (OSGi + Java EE) applications in GlassFish and Our second hybrid application: EJB as OSGi Service and OSGi Declarative Service bundle in GlassFish.
• Also see Arun's note building on this work at GlassFish v3 with different OSGi runtimes – Felix, Equinox, and Knoplerfish

From the past: JRuby on GlassFish (triggered by this thread)

• From GF Wiki: Getting Started with JRuby on GF

Two news pieces related to JBoss that are relevant to GF readers.

JBoss has announced that it has chosen Apache CXF as its main web services stack. My tally is (please send me corrections): Metro - GlassFish, WLS, Sun's JDK, IBM's JDK, TMaxsoft, a few other JavaEE licensees. CXF - Geronimo 2 (shared with Axis2), MuleSource, JBoss Axis2 - Geronimo 2 (shared with Axis2) Axis - WAS (?) And Sacha announces his departure from Red Hat. Enjoy the actively doing nothing part!

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.

Metro, the GlassFish Web Services stack (Metro) continues to gain adoption. Jitu reports its presence in the JDK used in WAS 7.0 (open beta). Previous reports include JBoss 5.0 and Oracle (nee BEA) WebLogic Server. This is not surprising: the performace of Metro is very good (see, for instance, yesterday's testimonial), its interoperability is outstanding, it's Flexible Architecture supports multiple Encodings and Transports, includes REST suport via Jersey, the licenses (GPLv2+CDDL) are very usable, it has a Growing Community and great Tool Support in NB 6.1 and is an Award-Winner.

Metro is directly available in the enterprise-ready GlassFish v2 as well as in the modular GFv3, as well as in Sun's JDK. And, if you really insist, we even show you how to Install it on Tomcat :-)

Developer.com awards a Product of the Year and this year several of our family, friends and relatives are winners: Metro, NetBeans, JSR 223, JavaSE 6 and PostgreSQL. Full details in the Developer.COM article: [1], [2].

I was "on vacation" last week, so the news are a bit late, but the news on July 1st confirmed the rumor: Oracle WebLogic Server is Oracle's "Strategic AppServer" - see the articles at The Register and InfoWorld. This comes on top of recent surveys on Oracle/BEA usage: SOA-Talk and The Register.

A consequence of this move is that Metro is now used Oracle's main AppServer, increasing the adoption of GlassFish's WebServices stack. The same applies to JAXB RI; and, in that case, I know of no mainstream AppServer that uses a different implementation!

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.