New blogger! Siegfried Bolz is working on his Diplom-Informatiker in Computer Science in Munich and joined the blogosphere with a nice set of notes. His first entry shows how to run GlassFish v2 with Quercus (i.e. PHP5) on OpenSUSE 10.1. Given the earlier news on Frank and Ted, this seemed appropriate.

Note that OpenSUSE is not among the list of platforms where GlassFish is officially supported. But it just works.

Vivek has a new job: help make GlassFish (v2 and v3) the preferred platform for scripting on the server-side. What languages? JRuby for sure, but we want them all, from Groovy to PHP to Jython, to... Choosing the winner is hard, we want the winner to choose us!

Check Vivek's blog for his announcement, and for his first weekend project: a Ruby Plugin for Hudson. And contact him if you want to help with the effort!

Arun has two new writeups on PHP and GlassFish (and jMaki). In the first one he provides updated instructions on how to Run PHP on GlassFish using Quercus the PHP on JVM implementation. In the second he Adds jMaki widgets. Note that jMaki can also be used with Native PHP (see this story). You can read on earlier reports on PHP here.

One of the key benefits of Metro, the Web services stack in GlassFish, is basic Web services interoperability provided by JAX-WS RI and .NET 3.0 interoperability by Project Tango. Greek School Network is using it successfully with NuSOAP as well. Metro was chosen over Apache Axis and several other candidates. For the Java WS framework there were several candidates like Apache Axis and JAX-RPC but we choose JAX-WS 2.1, both because of its elegant programming model and the fact that in the newly published Java EE 6 proposal JAX-RPC will be proposed for future deprecation.

And the NetBeans Web services wizard is found to be very useful as well:

Our development platform was NetBeans 5.5 which provided a powerful wizard that starting from the WSDL that NuSOAP published, created the necessary Java stub code for our operations.

A variety of screencasts showing develop/deploy/invoke cycle of Web services using Metro and NetBeans are available here.

Over at the Sun Developer Network, Marina Sum has been on a tear this past week or so, with two articles on OpenSSO and its sister product, Sun Java System Access Manager. Last week, she and I published Single Logout: A Demo, a follow-up to February's article Switch on SAML for PHP With Project Lightbulb, covering Project Lightbulb's evolution into OpenSSO Extensions and its implementation of SAML 2.0 single logout. Much discussion of the mechanics of single logout and its implementation in the OpenSSO SAML 2.0/PHP Extension.

Today, Marina and Robert Skoczylas of Indigo Consulting published Developing Secure Applications with Sun Java System Access Manager, Part 1: Basic Authorization. This article, part 1 of a series, presents a case study of implementing authentication, single sign-on, and authorization at a fictional health-care insurance company. Great stuff, working from a high-level description of the problem right down to specific Access Manager customizations.

More WADL news from Thomas: the latest version of REST Compile can generate clients in Ruby and Python in addition to the original PHP. As before, the Web App is here (and the german version is here - no catalan yet :-]). Since we are Wadling..., check Paul's comments on its benefits and the documentation on RESTful Web Services in SWDP r2 - which also supports WADL.

Thomas is making progress with REST Compile and REST Describe. The latest release (0.2 - Web App, Source Bundle) includes a WADL editor and a generator for client code from WADL (PHP for now) as well as support for more WADL features. For more details on WADL check the web site, and these earlier TA entries; for details on REST compile and describe, check Thomas' entry.

WADL seems to be gaining traction. A bit too early, but I think WADL will be a winner, and things like Thomas' work is addressing both the value proposition (generating clients) and the cost (inference from existing messages). Looking forward to more examples of tools exploiting WADL (validators, for example...).

In the ever-growing list of GlassFish partners at CommunityOne (May 7th, less than 2 weeks away!), here is Caucho. Caucho's Quercus is a fast, 100% Java implementation of the PHP language allowing developers to use PHP flexibility for the web interface and Java for stability.

As previously highlighted by Ludo, Quercus works just fine on GlassFish v2 which opens the door for PHP developers to APIs such as JAX-WS/WSIT or JPA, to the EJB3 component model, and to GlassFish features such as load-balancing, administration, or clustering. Caucho will be at GlassFish Day to show exactly this: typical PHP applications running on a complete open source Java stack.

For an overview of GF Day check here; and, for a free registration, here. Stay tuned for more announcements.

Last week Ludo explained how to run MediaWiki on GlassFish using Quercus. Just after that, Alexis had success with phpBB using a different approach, via the -portbase feature. Also check David Herron's blog - he works in the JVM team is one of our "any language as long as it is the JVM underneath" guys - and this TSS thread.

PS. the main site for phpBB is down right now with a RAID failure; that's why my image is linking to the Wikipedia entry.

Following on from last week's entry on OpenID on OpenSSO, we rolled the new OpenID code into OpenSSO over the weekend and are today announcing OpenSSO Extensions (more detail in my blog entry at Superpatterns) - an incubator for OpenSSO. The OpenID code is there, as is the existing 'Lightbulb' SAML 2.0 PHP and a new Client SDK for OpenSSO implemented in PHP.

The idea is that, if you have an idea for a cool extension to OpenSSO, maybe a new authentication module or identity repository plugin, you can work on it in the OpenSSO community, with the code hosted in a 'sandbox' under the opensso/extensions tree. As extensions mature we'll look at migrating them into the OpenSSO core.

The Quercus team delivered it, Ludo checked it out, and it works! Quercus 3.1 (WAR, ReadMe, WebSite) now installs on GlassFish and will run simple hello world apps, complex examples like MediaWiki and other PHP goodies like jMaki. The List of Supported PHP Apps includes some very popular PHP solutions. Ludo has detailed instructions, including settings for JDK6 and JDK5. Note that Quercus runs only interpreted under GlassFish; it seems the compiler mode still has Resin-specific dependencies. Altogether, a very nice solution. It will be interesting to see whether the Quercus team continues to expand from a Resin-only implementation to one that works in multiple containers.

Here are two recent entries showing how to use fastCGI to enable using Scripting Languages in the new Sun WebServer 7.0. First, check Natarajan detailed blog to learn how to use the new PHP AddOn. Then you can also check Seema and Marina's very detailed article to use Ruby on Rails. All TheAquarium entries related to the Sun WebServer use the WebServer tag. For details on the Sun WebServer 7.0, check the Product Page and the SDN Developer page. The download is available here and the documentation here.

As I just mentioned over at Superpatterns, Marina Sum and I just published an article on the Sun Developer Network (SDN) - Switch on SAML for PHP with Project Lightbulb. The article walks through some of the Project Lightbulb code, following the single sign-on process. If you want to work with the Lightbulb code, or you just want a better idea of how SAML 2.0 works, this article is for you.

PHP (home page, tutorial, online manual) is very popular language - see this Netcraft survey - for writing Web Applications. A common combination includes Linux, Apache WebServer, MySQL and PHP (thus the term LAMP), but PHP is usable from many other containers. Joe's recent Technical Article explains how to use Sun's WebServer with PHP using different connecting technologies, including as a CGI engine, using FastCGI and as an NSAPI Plugin. Many more PHP-related articles at TheAquarium here.

If learning how to write Ajax enabled web apps is one of your New Year's resolutions then check out the following blogs. My blog, Building web 2.0 apps with jMaki uses one of the layout templates, glue code to tie widgets together and the injector code to load pages within a div tag to create a web application. The glue code ties the Yahoo Geocoder and Google Maps widgets. The injector is used to load the page containing those widgets in the div tag genereated by layout template and navigation is done using the Dojo fisheye widget.

Jennifer published two blogs at roughly the same time. Fun with jMaki: Using the Yahoo Geocoder service with the Dojo Combobox also uses the Yahoo Geocoder but she used the Yahoo Map and a combobox to select the city to map. More Fun with jMaki: Getting Data From a Bean shows how to get data from a bean using an EL experssion to a widget (in this case ComboBox). The data is converted to JSON format using the org.json libary.

Finally, checkout the new project jmaki-charting. This friend of jMaki project provides a charting widget which can be added to the jMaki framework. It's open source, freely available and it supports Java, PHP and Phobos.