Greg Luck, EHCache maintainer and GlassFish community member has been busy in the recent weeks. First, he released EHCache 1.5.0 and soon after came EHCache debugger, but also EHCache Server with a SOAP interface built using Metro (as the WSDL shows).

Greg discusses the rationale behind the SOAP choice on his blog and explains that the server is available as a war archive that can be either deployed in a Java Application Server or simply started using its embedded GlassFish v3 engine. In addition to the SOAP interface, Greg is also working on a RESTful implementation of the EHCache server, this time with Jersey (JAX-RS's reference implementation in the works) under the hood.

EHCache is a popular distributed cache used by many frameworks and applications. Previous EHCache entries on this blog are here.

If you are using or planning to use GlassFish v3 (with or without the embedded mode), feel free to comment here or send us email, we'll happily mention it here.

In the heels of the Developer.COM Award for Metro for its interoperability capabilities here are two blog posts from Guy Burstein specifically describing how to do it: From SilverLight and From .NET Client. Metro interoperability is a key reason for the Metro Adoption. We have had a number of GlassFish customer wins that started on a desire to interoperate with Microsoft's stack. And it is always nice to see GlassFish mentioned at MSDN :-)

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].

Martin reports on improvements to his Metro plugin that allows Web Services development with Grails. He also upgraded to Grails 1.0.3. See Martin's note and check the Plugin page.

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!

A couple of weeks ago Bhakti showed how to Install Metro on GF v3 TP2 but that didn't include proper NetBeans support. Martin has been working on the NetBeans module and there is now a version to try with the latest NB 6.5 developer build. Full details on how to download each component, including the two update centers, at Martin's Note. Note that JSR109 integration is not yet available; stay tuned for that. Enjoy! And report any issues to Martin and Bhakti.

From last week, mostly to keep a record of milestones in community projects: JAXB RI 2.1.7 Now Available. This bug-fixing release matches the version bundled in Metro 1.2.

The GFv3 TP2 does not include the SOAP web services stack - Metro - (content) but it has all the required hooks and Metro is available from the v3 download center, as Bhakti explains in her Latest Note. Installation is straight-forward with the new UpdateCenter (ScreenShot). Try it out and let us know how it goes.

BTW, for those curious, you can poke to the IPS repositories through HTTP: windows, linux, mac, solaris SPARC, solaris x86

PS. As you can see, in addition to Metro, the GFv3 repository includes Grails support, Jersey (RESTful Web Services), jMaki/AJAX, and jRuby. Since TP2 already includes the Java Web Tier (Servlet+JSP+JSF) and JPA (EclipseLink), it is actually a very functional release - please share your experiences with it.

The GlassFish Podcast has already provided some GlassFish audio, but this time Ed Ort brings us video with this interview of members of the Metro Web Services Security team. The interview, which was taped at the recent Hyderabad Sun Tech Days, starts off with interviewee background questions before it gets into the point-to-point vs. end-to-end security tradeoff (both of which Metro can do).

It then goes on to discuss the four main parts (specifications really) implemented today in Metro : WS-Security, WS-SecurityPolicy, WS-Trust, and WS-SecureConv (full list). The interview finally touches on the future beyond Metro 1.1 which is mainly about implementation of next versions of the specifications.

If nothing else, this is a good time to put a face on a name if you've been participation in the Metro mailing list or forum. If you're coming to JavaOne, you may want to write down this Microsoft/Sun session about interoperable web services.

You know the saying... "when Pigs Fly..."? Well, Clemen's Latest note starts: A flock of pigs has been doing aerobatics high up over Microsoft Campus in Redmond What he is referring is that he just checked in GlassFish and Metro into the latest Biztalk SDK! Neat! And he has some very nice words for the Metro team, as Arun highlights.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Alexis highlights another Microsofter, Stéphane, on another aspect of the same relationship: GF and NetBeans being available at Microsoft Technology Centers.

I think we may have a new mascot - the flying pig!

A new Tech Tip written by Jiandong Guo of the Application Server Web Services Security team was just posted. Read the tip and learn the basics of WS-SecureConversation. Also see an example that demonstrates how to enable secure conversations for a web service through the WS-SecureConversation support in Metro. You can find the tip here. Setting up the infrastructure can be tricky, so if you're getting started with WS-SecureConv, this is a good document to read. You can get to all the Tech Tips from this site or this blog.

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.

The latest stable version of Metro (which ships as part of GlassFish v2) has been extensively tested with Microsoft's WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) version 3.0. The next version of .Net 3.5 is already out and the team is working hard to achieve the best possible interoperability with this new set of WS-* implementations.

Harold and Rama report on the most recent "plugfest" with Microsoft engineers. The work involves moving from some non-standard technologies (such as WS-ReliableMessaging 1.0 which is "just" a specification, not an open standard) to the OASIS version (OASIS WS-RM 1.1, dated July 2007) for better interoperability. The set of test scenarios is comprehensive and results very promising.

Check out Metro's roadmap here for an idea of when to expect stable releases. In the mean time, you can get the nightly builds.

Does GlassFish support REST or SOAP Web Services? Both! REST through Jersey and SOAP through Metro (Jersey will be included in a future Metro release, see Roadmap). Security is very important for SOAP Web Services and Jiandong has a set of notes describing how Metro supports WS-SX (OASIS Web Services Security Exchange). Check out the Overview, How to Issue SAML Tokens and a description of a Scenario based on WS-SX.

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.