Joe is reporting over 17 proposals in his latest post, including familiar names like Neal Gafter, Josh Bloch and Bob Lee, but also many others; I tried to get an up-to-date count from the Mail Archive but there was hard to count... which is good.

I think the project will be a big success, and may be a good indicator of the type of activity possible through OpenJDK. I'll keep you posted, in the meantime, check out Joe's status update and his Strings in Switch proposal.

Many of the GlassFish Server new customers are an example of this interaction: they are replacing expensive closed source AppServers with GlassFish. The strong Java EE standard means that the transition is relatively easy; the transparency of GlassFish (facilitated by Open Source) further simplifies that port, and Open Source in GF also guarantees to the customer that the cost cannot be unreasonable - otherwise a fork would appear.

The standard enables easy entry into and easy exit from different implementations and enables competition; Open Source injects good qualities into that competition. And competition is good for customers.

From Ruby-land, news that Merb will merge into Rails 3. This seems a case where combining the two efforts should improve the result. We are also noticing a significant increase in the mindshare around JRuby in all these projects as the quality of JRuby continues to increase. Added - also see the Story at SDTimes.

Crossbow is the Solaris' Network Virtualization architecture and has just been released into OpenSolaris. Crossbow provides "virtualized lanes" that will scale at high performance over many cores; see Sunnay's Introduction and Ben's two posts: Announcement and Experiments. Crossbow is useful for Network Resource Allocation and will have deep implications for our Virtualization offerings - see Michaels' note from 2008 on the topic.

From the cloud computing area, Sun acquires Q-Layer; see the Press Release. Vijay has two relevant posts: an Introduction with several good links and a Terminology Overview; Om (@GigaOm) also writes about the Acquisition. Q-Layer should be a great addition to the xVM family.

We planned it a while ago, announced it in July, and it finally happened! The core of the Sun Web Server (used in places like MLB.com and Sun's own BSC and Sun Forums) is now Open Source - see the announcements from CVR and Jyri. The ancestry of the code goes back to the Netscape Server but it has changed quite a bit; see Jyri's details. Sun Web Server 7.0 U4 is included in OpenSolaris but it is also available separately as part of the Sun Web Stack 1.4 and contains many features that complement the GlassFish Server.

Finally, from Solaris-land, a note that Sun is now doing Stricter Enforcement of the existing Patch Policy. No changes or impact on the situation for Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server patches - see our Sun's GF Enterprise Support.

Sun just announced a new Add-On as part of the MySQL Enterprise Subscription. The MySQL Query Analyzer is designed to save time and effort in finding and fixing problem queries; "time and effort vs money" being the trade-off between the free and for-pay offerings. For details, check the Overview article, Zach's Introduction and the interview with the project lead, Mark Matthews.

Coverage of the new offering includes InformationWeek and ComputerWorld. There is already a very nice testimonial from the Clickability CTO; another report (nb. from a sun employee) is here. And you can make your own evaluation through the MySQL Trials offering.

More frameworks come with GlassFish support out-of-the-box. Seam 2.1.0 GA is out and GF support is now explicitly mentioned ([1], [2]), and Terracotta 2.7 is out, also with GlassFish support ([2]).

JBoss announces a new relationship with Magnolia (website). The tip landed in my inbox as a "new JBoss portal strategy" and there seems to be some angle there as JBoss.org is switching from the JBoss portal to Magnolia Enterprise, but I think of Magnolia as mostly a CMS product rather than a portal, so will keep an eye on more details. See Announcement.

NetBeans continues to get closer to NB 6.5. The community builds with the multiple localizations are now available for review and feedback - check out Masaki-san's writeup.

GlassFish v3 Prelude includes support for the EJB 3.1 draft through the new update center, and Marina has modified instructions on how to Use the EJB Timer (small modification from previous instructions).

And, as Android becomes more real, Google has Open Sourced it.

A new Enterprise Tip, this time from Ashutosh, showing how to Securing Attachments in Web Services messages using Metro, the WS framework used in GlassFish (and several other AppServers).

Arun writes from Brazil and reports on Sun TechDays, day 1. He presented on GlassFish server and his session was packed - check out his Slides; he also covered the awards to two of our GAP winners: Reginaldo (blog, submission), and Claudio (blog, submission).

Santiago has been documenting different features of the, GlassFish-Based Mobile Enterprise Platform and has another entry providing more information on Writing MEP Connectors. See MEP Announcement and the MEP-tagged entries.

India has a very strong Code For Freedom tradition, and Sun just announced is Support of the 2008 Edition. The Sun communities included are described here; the prizes are here

News from the OpenJDK community on what seems a very successful JVM Languages Summit. I've already asked John Rose if he would be willing to give us an overview at Online Webinar and we are looking for a slot in the schedule.

The TSS thread also reminded me of Scott McNealy's point about Cost-of-Exit; one of the benefits of standards with multiple implementations is that they encourage vendors to provide good service because the CoE is low. And I'll insert a plug for the EJB 3.1 Webinar.

BTW, Rail Gauges are a good example of the "Cost of Exit": Spain standardized on Iberian Gauge in the mid-19th century; there are plans to switch to standard gauge, but I'll believe it when it happens...

The NetBeans folks have a new Introductory Tutorial to Ajax, now updated to the forthcoming NetBeans 6.5.

Srenga points that the DataMashup Service Engine from Mural is Part of GlassFish ESB and also points to Manish's Tutorial on building a Server-Side Data Mashup.

From Carol a Screencast on RESTful Comet, based on her previous posts.

From Peter Mularien a look at Who is Contributing to SpringSource? using FishEye on SpringFrameworks Core. BTW, if you do the same with GlassFish (core) you will find mostly Sun folks; the bulk of the non-Sun contribution is in the smaller, reusable components, like grizzly, which makes sense as that's where people want their specific features in.

From apaspai a description of how to configure GlassFish with Hibernate and MySQL (in Spanish, sorry, I couldn't resist).

From Montana Grizzlies are Rebounding from Extinction (there were already very healthy On the Web, in Canada, and, more recently, also in Prague!). And, from the WebKit folks, reports of substantial improvements on JavaScript interpretation using SquirrelFish Extreme.

And Apple does it Again, this time with Mail, and it Gets Slashdotted.