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

Data Deduplication is a big deal, as was shown back in July when EMC spent 2.4B$ to acquire Data Domain. This morning Jeff announced that dedup has been added to ZFS; this has generated quite a bit of buzz in the 'web, although I've yet to see Oracle's stock going up... or Apple changing their mind. Check Jeff's post and comments; it is a nice read. Also read on disk savings at ZFS-Discuss.

Apple kills ZFS at MacOS Forge. The effort had shown signs of stress for a while, so the community reaction ([1], [2]) has been to quickly move to a new site; see Dustin's announcement and MacZFS @ Google Code. See reactions on the web at Engadget, AppleInsider, Gizmodo and Macrumors. The Goodbye message was very terse. Given Apple's usual behavior, I doubt we will get any more details than that. Overall reaction is quite muted - the reaction meter at MR was 85+, 400- but the Discussion Thread is quite mild (and technically uninformed).

Earlier in the month, we announced a Virtual Image for WebSpace. In the note I mentioned that that image included a "JeOS OpenSolaris Prototype", and that effort was Formaly Announcement on Tuesday. JeOSs play an important piece of the virtualization story, so here is a set of links to get you up to speed quickly.

JeOS stands for "Just Enough OS" ("just right" as with the Three Bears). JeOS is usually described as including the JeOS media ( OS core {Kernel,Drives,Login} + OS Mimimum maintenance tools + Minimum user space tools ) + Packages repository (DVD or Network based). The term is relatively new; an early (initial?) reference seems to be from Jordi's; also see Cocktail. There are different JeOS depending on what OS they are based. Linux is currently a popular base; three variants are Ubuntu JeOS (Wikipedia, WebSite, and How to use it), Oracle (Oracle EL JeOS and Product Page) and Novell (Novell SUSE JeOS, LimeJeOS Blog details).

We believe that there are some benefits in having an OpenSolaris based JeOS, and several folks have been working on that. The Announcement Above is part of that process; more links in follow-up notes.

Praneet had previously shown how to run ADempiere with GlassFish and now has expanded that to include OpenSolaris and PostgreSQL in a more Detailed Document. Additional links in Praneet's Note. Pranee't previous posts were covered in this spotlight.

Kohsuke has added several OS-specific features to Hudson, including authentication on Unix using the OS-specific identity/groups and remote Windows slave management. Hudson can also now switch its workspace to a ZFS file system. ZFS support is a precursor to additional features like better backups and faster clean builds and matrix builds. It will be interesting to see whether these features increase noticeably the market share of Solaris and OpenSolaris as Hudson platforms. More details in Kohsuke's note.

Installing GlassFish for developing is fairly easy and you are even given multiple options (simple JAR installer, Sun installer, IzPack-based installer, and now zip-based for v3). Installing GlassFish for production certainly needs a bit more care.

Brian Leonard over at the OpenSolaris "Observatory" blog has a recent entry on how to setup GlassFish for production use in a cluster profile. It covers installation from the update center, user setup, domain directory, and SMF service creation.

Also don't forget to read the GlassFish "Installation Guide" and "Deployment Planning Guide" from the standard documentation set.

Szeretgom.hu is a nice GlassFish adoption story. János Cserép started this local community site back in 2006 and it has grown very nicely: Webreklam reports 250K pageviews/month and 15K unique users/month in a city of 30K! The technology set includes GlassFish v3, Sun Web Server, Apache Wicket, Hudson, OpenSolaris and Sun Fire X2100. For more details, check out the Adoption Story, the Full Questionnaire and János Presentation.

I am a strong believer that Competition is Good for Customers, and this week's CES Show was another reminder; some examples from there:

• Palm Pre - This seems one of the best of the iPhone challengers - looks like a good OS, multi-tasking/touch, physics, nice design and a keyboard. See homepage, wikipedia, Gizmodo and PCWorld. • Sony Vaio P - This one looks like a nice netbook, with a wide screen, build around a good sized keyboard. The use of a trackpoint means the whole thing can be sized just for the keyboard - would love to try it out. Competition for the "lesser" netbooks and the always rumored iPod tablet? See Gizmodo, Engadget. • Dell Adiamo - This one (if the promise matches the buzz) would compete with MacBook Air; if it keeps with Dell's pricepoints, it would help with the pricing. See Gizmodo and Engdget. • Windows 7 - This one, I hope will help keep Apple focused in doing a good job with MacOS. Ubuntu and, I'd hope soon, OpenSolaris, can help with the pressure, but I've felt that the quality of the desktop offerings from Apple has decreased since the iPod/iPhone started generating so much money, and they can use a strong competidor. See homepage and Gizmodo.

Now, back to our usual topics, helping you by providing our own competition :-)

This December had several major releases in the last few weeks but I've been busy (what happened to "Slow Decembers"?), so catching up before I close TheAquarium for the end-of-year break. Chronologically...

OpenSolaris - Although the last release candidate build was late November, the actual launch was Dec 11th. The launch included an online event (using uStream.tv, see the live chat action), many blogs posts and PR activity. Some good entry points and summaries include: Stephen, Bob Porras, Calum, Josh and the Observatory. One recent change in preparation for this release was improvements on the web presence. The main web site for the DEVelopers of OpenSolaris remains OpenSolaris.org but USERs now have an improved OpenSolaris.com with many useful sections. There are many features; two extra noteworthy are the ZFS-based Time Slider, and the new package format (IPS) and the backing repositories. Since we also IPS for the GlassFish v3 UC, you may want to check the notes on the Distro Constructor Mirroring IPS, the RoboPorter, and the new Pending and Contrib repositories (Nico, Richb). The usability of OpenSolaris has improved a lot in the last year - I'm going to try to get one of Toshiba's Laptops next year - and the deployment strengths remain. The day after the launch we hosted an Introductory Webinar and I'm planning follow-ups focused on the use of deployment features like Zones, Dtrace and ZFS in GlassFish et al.

Our next webinar is scheduled for Thursday, Dec 11th, 11:00 am PT, on OpenSolaris (speaker list is still shimmering). We plan to provide overviews of the key features and help get people started using the releases. We will use OpenSolaris 2008.11 as it should release on Dec 10th (see What's New and Jim's Announcement). We will follow-up with one or two other WebSets early in 2009 focused on how to exploit the features in GlassFish, WebStack and/or Hudson deployments.

Details of the presentation at the Show Wiki Page as they are finalized.

Sun has posted SPECjAppServer 2004 results for a full OpenSource stack including MySQL 5.0, GlassFish v2 U2 and OpenSolaris 2008.05 on Sun's 1U SunFire x4150. The setup uses two x4150 running GF and one running MySQL, all on OpenSolaris. Check out the detailed posts by BMSeer and Tom (Overview and Price Analysis). Also see the SPEC detailed submission and the relevant x4150 Benchmark page. The results take advantage of recent MySQL Performance Improvements including [1], [2], [3], [4].

Note Required disclosure : SPEC and SPECjAppServer are registered trademarks of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of 11/05/2008. 2xSun Fire X4150 (8 cores, 2chips) and 1xSun Fire X4150 (4 cores, 1 chip) 1197.10 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard; Best result with 8 cores in application-tier of the benchmark: 1xHP BL460c (8 cores,2chips) and 1xHP BL480c (8 cores,2 chips) 2056.27 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard; Best result with 2 systems in application-tier of the benchmark: 2xDell PowerEdge 2950 (8 cores, 2 chips) and 1xDell PowerEdge R900 (4 chips, 24 cores) 4,794.33 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard.

Today was the launch of our new Sun Storage 7000 Family, the first result of our OpenStorage initiative. The release comes with a large number of formal and informal documents (over 50 blogs tagged SunStorage7000 so far!); key entry points are the Fishworks Blog Site, and the personal blogs of Mike, Bryan and Adam. Also check the introductions by Joerg, Josh and Bob, the Product Site, the Storage Simulator and the Master Blog Aggregator.

Mike's summarizes the architectural approach behind the new systems this way: There are three things that will be at the core of everything we do: a true software architecture for Flash, the Hybrid Storage Pool; users empowered with real-time Analytics so you can finally understand what your box is doing and how to make it better; and an open, industry-standard architecture: open on-disk formats, open protocols, and a compute and i/o architecture with volume economics behind it that doubles in speed and capacity every 12-18 months.

The initial Press Coverage press coverage is very positive. I believe that despite, or perhaps because of?, the worldwide financial situation, these systems will have a deep impact in the market; try it out, and tell us what you think!

A compilation of today's news of interest:

Last week Kenai went beta, with the usual services in a development hub site plus an additional "connected" angle. Our GF CORBA project is already using its Hg repository but another very interesting angle is the technology mix.

Kenai acheived development agility with reliability by using a combination of our scripting (JRuby/Rails) and enterprise (GlassFish v2, MySQL, OpenSolaris) technologies. These combinations are beginning to pop all over and are one of the key targets of GlassFish, using JRuby (see Nick's Blog site), Groovy (see Glenn's GroovyBlogs), or others. Back to Kenai, check out Tim's Interview with Nick, and some Technical Details on Caching and in Testing/Performance Methodology. Also see Pictures from Austvik, Spotlight from Arun and Lenz's Technology Overview.