The importance of information exchange in Health Care will continue to grow and the Federal Goverment has several projects to improve it, while also trying to reduce costs. And, as Bill wrote earlier in the year, Sun's Open Source has been actively engaged in this.

Added - Just noticed Tim O'Reilly's note on WhiteHouse.GOV's stack. They use MySQL, Drupal and Apache.

The goal of the National Health Information Network (NHIN) is to provide secure, nationwide, interoperable health information infrastructure that will connect providers, consumers, and others involved in supporting health and healthcare. And the CONNECT Gateway is intended to let the federal agencies connect to the NHIN. Within the HHS, the ONC is the main entity that coordinates these efforts and it just has choosen Health Information Exchange Open Source (HIEOS) as a key portion of NHIN Connect.

And, HIEOS - developed by Vangent - is using several of our OpenSource components - see Architectural Diagram - including OpenESB and GlassFish, and MySQL.

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).

IntelliJ IDEA is now available in two editions. The Community Edition (JavaSE-focused) is now Available under OpenSource at JetBrains.org, while the Ultimate Edition is JavaEE-focused (Supports GlassFish) remains for-fee. See this detailed comparison chart.

Too many variables going on right now to guess how important this development will be for IDEs, but competition is (almost always) better for consumers.

Ken Jacobs (Dr. DBA) has Announced Plugin 1.0.4. This release has significant performance improvements, including a number of key 3rd Party Contributions. Reactions from the community so far seem very positive ([1], [2]). Hopefully this is good news for everybody out there reading tea-leaves on how Oracle will treat its not-yet-there new projects.

The NetBeans Community Acceptance Team (NetCAT) was created to facilitate wide community participation in validating the quality of the NetBeans distributions. The same principles are now being applied to two new areas: Bug Fixing and New Development

The new programs are NetFIX (mailing list) and NetDEV (mailing list). In both cases the principle is to encourage participation through a support group and some direct help from more experienced developers.

NetCAT has been very successful and we applied it to GlassFish via FishCAT (Wiki, entries@TA) In the past we had explored ideas like "adopt-a-bug" and "starter bugs" for GlassFish; perhaps the NetFIX and NetDEV ideas would be applicable too.

Check the project websites and also see Toni's post for more details.

One of the unforeseen impacts of OpenSource on the developmet of GlassFish has been the large set of internet tools that we regularly use on it. Some of them are... • Code Analysis Tools like: SVNSearch, Ohloh, FishEye and FindBugs (old!) • Mail Archiving tools like: MarkMail and Nabble. • RSS Search Engines like Bloglines and Icerocket • Search tools like Google and Bing, with new variants like BingTweets.

What other internet tools do you use with GlassFish? BTW, the image at left is the Collaboration Graph, via SVNSearch.

The 10th FISL starts this week. Like previous years, it looks like a lot of fun: the Program is full of good content, and there is also Porto Alegre... FISL starts on the 24th and it is preceded by Javali, an event focused on Java, on the 23rd (Agenda).

I did a quick pass through the FISL program to highlight some sessions, including those related to GlassFish Projects and friends:

• Arun on GF, MySQL and NetBeans (S205) (Arun's note)
• Mauricio on OSGi in GFv3 (S736)
• Ludo will talk about OpenDS (S473) (Ludo's note)
• Fabiane on Hudson (S733)
• Pat on OpenSSO (S360) (Pat's note)
• Fabio Veloso on Jersey (S282)

Other talks related to GlassFish include

• On OpenJDK, Bruno (S734) and Charlie (S226)
• On OpenSolaris Rafael (S600) and Brian (S749)
• On NetBeans et al, Geertjan (S735), and
• On OSS, Simon (S757),

I wish I was there! If you attend FISL or Javali, please report back.

A couple of recent Red Hat announcements are relevant to the competitive landscape around the GlassFish products:

Red Hat announced Open Choice, which notably includes support for the Spring Framework. Also see the Press Release, Rich's note, and reactions from The Register and Rod Johnson; and, for historical/wider context, recall Oracle and Spring.

The second announcement is the eXo and JBoss Partnernship, which seems quite similar to our partnership with Liferay around Sun GlassFish WebSpace Server. See Rick's post, the PR and comments at CMS Watch.

Additional business context for all these moves include our Partnership with Liferay, the immediate release of Java EE 6 and GlassFish v3, the Oracle announcement, and even the JSR299 and JSR330 exchanges. The next few months will be interesting...

Release models make a huge difference in the properties of the software delivered. I believe there is no single "ideal" model; what to choose depends on the code base, the group/community creating the code, the users/customers, the technology available (languages, CI tools, others)... What works for Hudson does not work for GlassFish nor for Solaris.

MySQL is changing its release model to improve agility, quality, predictability and facilitate contributions. Giuseppe just posted an Overview; in a nutshell, the trunk tree is always in beta quality, new features are first developed in stage branches, then integrated into the trunk, which is then brought to RC quality and another cycle starts (see Diagram). Full details at the MySQL Forge and in Tomas's Presentation at MySQL University (slides; recording is NYA).

The basic model seems feasible; now we need a few release cycles to adjust the model and we will see how it works in real-life. As Don Quijote said... the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Several pieces of good news on Sun's OpenStorage products. Earlier this week the product line was refreshed, both the 7110 and the 7210 offerings. At the same time the SS7000 Simulator has been updated and is now available as an OVF format and can run on the latest VirtualBox (2.2.2). Overall, the product line is doing very well and is the "fastest ramping new product in Sun's storage portfolio ever". Check the Product WebSite for more resources and links.

OpenStorage is an example of the benefits of a Systems Approach to products that leverages both hardware and software, and, on that general topic, check out this Interview with Larry Ellison (available from Oracle.com/sun).

SpringSource just announced it is Acquiring Hyperic. Although this is not really a big surprise given their previous OEM arrangement (and VC funding?), this is an significant development in the Enterprise Open Source space. Life is going to be more interesting... Obviously, I have no idea how Oracle will react to this, but I would love to know :-).

Thanks to Matt for the Tip. I will link here to other interesting comments as they appear:

• Sanjiva @ WSO2
• Zach @ InfoWorld

The Smoking Monkey has announced the release of OpenSSO Express Build 7, which includes key new features including: • Federation with Google Apps Premier • Additional Containers (like GlassFish v3 Prelude!) • Support for OpenDS Standard Edition OpenSSO Express is a very interesting product as it is an integral part of our official Roadmap and is fully supported. Sun will answer questions and will fix bugs on it but, unlike with OpenSSO Enterprise, customers are required to upgrade to a later Express or to the Enterprise binary to get the fixes.

The upgrade requirement means that the sustaining tail is much shorter, and manageable, which is why we can push the Express releases as often as we do. An Express release is not for all types of customers but it is ideal for those that want the latest features now and are willing to upgrade later; and those that do not want them just wait for the Enterprise releases. To simplify the sales story, the support plan for OpenSSO Enterprise includes OpenSSO Express.

Other related entries are tagged OpenSSO.

I cannot catch up with all the backlog of OpenDS news in a single post so for now I'll just mention the Availability of OpenDS 1.3 b2 and then I want to highlight the work related to Garbage First (G1) GC.

G1 is our most recent Garbage Collecting algorithm and it is intended to replace the current CMS (see John's Overview of JDK's GCs) in JDK7. G1 is sketched in Alex's note; more details in TS-5419 or try it by yourself in a recent OpenJDK. The OpenDS team has high demands for performance and responsivenes which makes them a good demanding customer for the G1 team (like CBOE!) and, in a recent visit, the two worked together to improve performance - see Matt's writeup. A good example of the advantage to Sun of leading both projects!

What is the connection between OpenGrok, Drizzle and Bazaar? Hudson, the Continuous Integration system. Check out Jorgen's writeup describing his Presentation on using Hudson with OpenGrok, and Trond's note on Bazaar Plugin, used with Drizzle Builds. Another connection is that Trond and Jorgen work in Sun's DataBase group in Trondheim, and you might think that is how they discovered Hudson, except that in a large, distributed, company, Open Source products often get adopted without any direct internal communication. Actually, in an internal recent presentation on Drizzle Brian was telling me about this great CI tool called Hudson! :-)

Sun's Identity Team (home to OpenSSO and OpenDS) has just announced a new open source project: Identity Connectors, to bridge between the Identity Manager, which provides auditing and provisioning, and the resources it manages.

The project already has over 12 connectors, from Active Directory to Google Apps. The corresponding version of IdMgr is 8.1, Just Released. Thanks to Tomas and Hanaki for the tip.