Overview article about Project Tango (now part of Metro) is now available in Chinese as well. Read it at Sun Developer Network China.

Jean-François "Grizzly" Arcand has posted two slide decks he used last month during his European tour : • Grizzly (covers basics, use in GlassFish V3, and the recent 1.7 release) • Comet, aka Ajax Push (if you ask Jean-François, it's the best thing since slided bread, and who knows, he may be right :)

Do you need to front-end your GlassFish with Apache ? You can use mod_proxy as described here. Thanks to Manor for the tip!

You can, of course, use Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 U1 with the built-in reverse-proxy.

Carol McDonald has updated her sample application to the latest versions of GlassFish (v2ur1), Spring (v2.5), and NetBeans (6.0) : • Sample Application using JSF, Spring 2.5, and Java Persistence APIs

Breaking News: • Oracle Announces Intent to Acquire BEA.   Good news for GlassFish... Also see Discussion at TSS.

Byron has a detailed post on why and how to setup JDBC Realm Authentication. It covers the use of JavaDB (embedded or server mode), creation of the JDBC connection pool with the appropriate settings, along with a few tips.

The Ask The Expert Session on GlassFish v2 is still going on until the end of this week (Friday). • Ask your question here. • Read the transcript here.

Ken Drachnik is interviewed in the latest SDN channel episode. This short interview is an overview of where the project stands now with a slight focus on Linux (the theme of this SDN Channel series).

If there was any doubt about how hot Virtualization is, check this Bloomberg Report on the initial offering for VMWare for US$ 957M.

Virtualization is happening at multiple layers in the hardware/software stack. At the bottom we have things like the Sun's ldoms - see this screencast of how to boot 64 Solaris domains on the recently launched UltraSPARC T2. Higher up we have things like Xen and VMWare.

Virtualization is a complex landscape; I'll ask Tim for a pointer to a good short description comparing and contrasting the solutions, the wikipedia entry is particularly unhelpful.

We are steadily moving towards Mark Weiser's Ubiquitous Computing, beyond PCs and mobile phones, into a world with robots, virtual worlds (Second Life, DarkStar, plain old software development...) and mapping elements between these worlds (like Extreme Feedback Devices, ORBs and bar codes. The Project Sun SPOT investigates a way to build these devices and they recently made available a development kit. One recent use of SPOTs has been in Project BlackBox ([1], [2]) If you are interested in more details, check out these JavaOne events.

I find the uses of SPOTS quite intriging and I am trying to get one kit for my group to play with and another to make available as a prize to whoever comes with the best idea. Start thinking and stay tuned for more details on the contest.

ZFS has just been incorporated to the FreeBSD code base ([1], [2]). And it has been previously reported that ZFS will be in Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) ([1], [2]). These are good signs for ZFS. In the world of Open Source, adoption of a technology by an outside community or project is a clear indicator of technical excellence (although not always - sometimes licensing and other issues get in the way). Closer to home, I see clear technical excellence in the large adoption of the JAXB RI (JBoss, TmaxSoft, Geronimo, WebLogic Server, Jonas, many others) and the increased adoption of the JAX-WS RI (WebLogic Server, TmaxSoft) and Grizzly (Jetty).

There are other GlassFish modules that have noticeable outside adoption including JSF, JSP and TopLinkEssentials. Projects like jMaki and Phobos are generating a lot of buzz but, to my knowledge, are not yet incorporated into outside projects. GlassFish, in toto, is also being adopted: it is included in several OpenSolaris distributions and in Ubuntu, and also in NetBeans (we are very open to expanding that list with additional distributions; if you are interested, just contact us).

I hope that, over time, we will have more and more adoption of GlassFish projects. And, where appropriate, we may end up adopting external projects and resist the NIH syndrome; our goal is technical excellence for the users of GlassFish.

Note: When I have a moment I'll add links to the above assertions; in the meantime just do a search at TheAquarium.

BEA today formally released WebLogic Server 10 (Press Release, Linux Mag, CBR Online). This release supports Java EE 5 and shows the increased adoption of the standard.

So far we have 6 vendors Java EE 5 Certified: BEA's WebLogic Server v10.0, Kingdee's Apsuic AppServer v5.0, SAP's NetWeaver 7.1, TmaxSoft's JEUS 6 and GlassFish v1 and Sun's distribution SJS AS PE 9.0.

It is always interesting to read between the lines in the Official PRs: BEA mentions their use of Spring but not that of GlassFish's Web Services stack, and they never mention the "key competidors" by name... Anyhow, welcome to the Java EE 5 party, the more, the merrier...!

First post in a new category. Notd is like the unix motd, but with "News" instead of "Message". I'll make up the details of the category as I go, but the general topic will be a piece of daily news that seems specially interesting (to me) for one reason or another; let's see how long I can keep it up.

The NY Times has a piece on the new Bar Codes designed for Camera Phones. The basic idea is that these bar codes will be everywhere in the physical world; you just take a picture of the bar code and the software on your camera will decode it to pull the data from the web. Within this basic premise the possibilities seem unlimited: real-estate information, public transit, retail prices, driving directions, ads in print, etc, etc. Given the market penetration of camera phones, and the increased network connectiviy, this seems a real winner. As the NYTimes puts it, the cellphone as the universal control. Add some locale awareness, some voice recognition, voice synthesis... The adoption may be very quick, we will see.