The JavaPolis conference is right around the corner and the content is looking very good so no wonder it is sold out. The GlassFish team is taking this opportunity to run a new contest. This time it's about writing a plugin for the Update Center (more blogs about the UC here. The winner will be announced during the conference next week but you do not need to attend to participate. This is your chance to package up (this can be very simple and very fast) your favorite framework or application and make it available to all GlassFish users. Think Spring, Wicket, Hibernate, CMS, etc...

There are multiple prizes. and the contest details (deadline, how to submit, rules for choosing the winner, ...) are here: http://glassfish.org/contest.

Apache Roller is moving in very interesting directions and now Dave is describing the new PlugIn APIs in Roller 4, from the PageModel to the RepeatableTask Interfaces. A PlugIn interface is key for adoption, as proven in many areas, including Hudson, Metro, WordPress and Confluence. Check the full description at Dave's Writeup and recall that Roller on GlassFish v2; see related TA entries and Alexis' screencast.

Three more Hudson Plugins and a nice Adoption Story: Peter Reilly contributes the Design Violations Plugin (aggregating FindBugs, PMD, CheckStyle and CPD), Hafner Ullrich contributes a Task Scanner Plugin, and David Vrzalik (at JBoss) fixes Hudson Issue #1, from 2005! The nice adoption story is that of JBoss, which is now using David's plugin to expose their builds at a Public Dashboard. More details at [1] and [2].

As another metric for Hudson's adoption: Nabble lists it as #3 in Activity among Java.Net projects, while Java.Net lists it as #4 in Mail Traffic; BTW, if you are interested in Nabble's metric check it here.

JDK 6 (nee Mustang) includes a bundled version of JAXB 2.0 and is almost out; to track it best, Kohsuke has released a matching unbundled implementation: JAXB 2.0.3. If there are no last minute show-stopper bugs, the two should be identical. You can download it from here. The maven repository has been updated with the latest bits. The JAXB 2.1 JARs, still in EA, have also been released to the Maven repository; check Kohsuke's blog. And in a separate blog he explains yet another Plugin; this one a way to handle simple cases of code regeneration.

The JAXB plug-in mechanism is proving very successful andt the community has produced a substantial number of plug-ins. Full directions on how to write plug-ins are here. Many plugins are available at JAXB2-Commons, others reside in their own projects. Plug-ins include: Fluent API, CamelCase Always, Value Constructor, Default Value, Interfaces, Equals, ToString, Jakarta-Commons-Lang, and JAXB Workshop. Kohsuke regularly provides updates on the JAXB community; he recently reported on New Plug-ins and on the HyperJAXB3 plugin that links JAXB with JavaPersistence.

A news update on JAXB 2.1 (planned for GlassFish V2). On the spec front, Kohsuke has written several blogs on the proposed changes including Specification Highlights, support for Separate Compilation and Use as a DI Container. He has also released the EA1 Implementation available separatedly and at the Maven Rep. The implementation also supports Better Linkage with FI, Better Customization and enables a better JAXB Eclipse Plugin.

For more information check here and here. BTW, note there is also a New Implementation of the current spec. More information at the JAXB home page and and in the JAXB Annoucements.

Like earlier versions, the JAXP 1.4 API (Java.Net OSS project, spec, JavaDocs) includes a pluggability layer to switch implementations using a Factory pattern. The whole area is not very well understood by the developers, and Santiago's detailed blog provides a very good summary.

The intrinsic problem is that this is an area where the spec can be improved, so start preparing your feedback for the next version of the spec... we are going to do it all at Java.Net and a main focus will be improved usability.