One of the goals of GlassFish v2 is to incorporate all the features in SJS AS 8.2 EE (Enterprise Edition). For the most part this means adding features that everybody would want, but some features are mostly for backwards compatibility, or because of specialized needs. The tradeoffs are acheived via the notion of Profiles. Shing Wai has posted a good Overview of how the different Security features map to GF v1, GF v2 and its profiles and SJS AS 8.2 EE. His summary table is very useful, check it out!

Milestone 3 for GlassFish v2 (aka v2b28) is now available for download, following M1 and M2. This release includes many new features and improvements; some of them are:

• Profile support (developer, enterprise, cluster)  • Initial Update Center Support.  • JSR-196 Public Draft.  • WS Interoperability (WSIT) Functionality Integrated.  • JBI Support Integrated.  • Partial Implementation of in-memory replication.  • Dynamic clustering from Shoal.  • Optimized ORB Integrated.  • Improved Startup Architecture.  • Improved Web Tier: Comet, virtual hosting, in memory JSP compilation, port unification.  • CLI improvements (including DWIM).  • JSF used in the Admin GUI.

More details in the GF v2 M3 Highlights page. Expect a few additions before the beta in February, but most of the functionality is already in this milestone. Download it here and let us know how it works for you.

Profile support is a key mechanism to make GlassFish V2 usable to simple developers and complex deployments. Kedar will be presenting the current proposal today, Wednesday, at 9am Pacific (GMT-7) time. I meant to post this yesterday but I scheduled it for the wrong day, my apologies for the short notice! Check the One Pager, and participate in the concall. For more information and future meetings, check the UE Wiki page.

Now, here is a question for the community. I would like to see more Non-Sun participation in these discussions, and I'd welcome suggestions on how to improve that. The current approach used by the GlassFish team relies on concalls to quickly cover the material initially, but a concall requires synchronicity and makes it hard for a casual or latecomer to participate. Groups like Apache rely on mailing lists, but these can drag over long periods of time - and email conversations do not work very well over +11 TZs.

In the brave new world of Wikis, forums, flashd demos, etc... do you have suggestions on how to increase participation without substantially slowing down development? Let us know your ideas so we can start trying them out.