It's been a hard year, but the GlassFish community has kept pushing v3 onward and all the indicators are that the result is very much worth the effort. The target date for GlassFish v3 is mid-December so the last few weeks have been very busy - check out these MarkMail charts: • DEV - last month was really close to an all-time record. • ISSUES - an easy all-time record. • QUALITY - highest since Sept'08. Plenty of progress to highlight from there; below are some.

Final Branch:

• Next Build and Branch for Final Release (Abhijit)
• No More Commits on v3 Trunk and Workspace Now Open for Commits (Jane)
• Hudson Branch Jobs Now Published (Terena)

If you are curious, peek at the hudson dashboard; it has plenty of very interesting jobs, including the nice progress on findbugs.

The FishCAT folks really deserve their own spotlights (soon), but see:

• Start Testing b73 ... and b74 (Judy) (and Survey on FishCAT)
• Latest build for GF Tools Bundle for Eclipse 1.2 (Ludo), and
• v3 + UC Issue: Latest ... Bundle for Eclipse 1.2 (Kampmeier)

And, from the doc team, final reviews of:

• ...GFv3 Application Deployment Guide (Dixie)
• ... Admin Guide (Dixie)
• ... v3 Documentation (Paul)

The FishCAT is Back! (with apologies to Dr. Seuss)! Judy has announced the Launch of the FishCAT Program for GlassFish v3, building on the success of the GFv3 Prelude Program (also see the 100 members achievement). We are in the final stretch for GFv3 (roadmap); if you are interested in helping with the quality of this critical release for GlassFish, check Judy's Post, and the FishCAT home and Wiki pages and contact Judy through the Quality Alias.

The Quality Team started the FishCAT program for the GFv3 Prelude release and it has worked very well - 36 members from 18 different countries, filing 125 reports plus much feedback. To celebrate the launch of v3 Prelude, Judy has posted a Thank-You, as well as the series of entries where she introduces key members of the team, starting with Adam (blog, photo), Sebastien (blog, photo) and Kirstian (blog, photo), I'm sure the FishCAT program will be repeated for v3 FCS and we will announce it when it happens. In the meantime, all the members continue to be engaged in GlassFish; for example, Adam is Ready to use GFv3 in production as soon as there is an EJB container ready...

The GlassFish Quality Community is doing an outstanding job! Check out the MarkMail Archive: 506 posts in August and 492 in September already. Part of reason is the GFv3 Prelude release but the bulk is just community focus. Check out the FishCAT reports ([1], [2], [3]) and the Community Meeting Minutes.

The GlassFish Quality Community is hard at working getting ready for next month's release of GlassFish v3 Prelude. Their meetings are all public - check the Meeting Minutes - and so are the meetings of the FishCat Team. Overall, the activity in the Quality mailing list is growing very fast - check out the MarkMail Archive. Maybe we can invite the team to report on the experience to the wider community; perhaps in our GlassFish Webinar Series? But after we ship GF v3 Prelude!

The GlassFish Quality group is expanding its community outreach and just started a new Community Acceptance Testing Program for the GlassFish Server (FishCAT). The program is inspired by NetBean's NetCAT program. Please consider participating. Details are at the FishCAT Home Page and in the FishCAT FAQ. Also check out Judy's Announcements for details on how to apply to be in the team - the deadline is August 15th. All this is getting ready for the GlassFish v3 release; more details imminent.

A recent thread at TSS discussed that BEA had certified WLS 10 Technology Preview against the Java EE 5 CTS. That's great news for platform adoption but I'll admit I was unhappy when I read a comment in that same thread that said:

GlassFish doesn't count since the public opinion is to avoid using Sun software except for the JDK...

I find the comment specially grating as BEA is Using GlassFish's Java EE 5 WS Stack in WLS 10. And Sun is using it in Sun's JDK6! And there are more adopters; a non-exhaustive list for JAX-WS includes BEA, Tmax Soft's JEUS 6, Sun's JDK, and more (adoption). The list for JAXB is longer, also including JBoss, Geronimo, Celtix, XFire... (adoption)

I believe GlassFish's Web Services layer is the best in the market; but obviously we need to (continue to?) improve our communication story :-(

Oh well; we will get there eventually - all the annecdotal indicators I see point to strong adoption.

We have gone a long way in transparency at GlassFish: check the What did not Go Right? thread at the quality alias. You may shrug this off, but a year ago, when we started the project these Sun engineers would have used some internal email or just the phone. True transparency includes discussing areas of improvement - in public aliases. All of this will be a total non-event very soon as we get more and more external participation and Sun-internal discussions become impractical.

As we get more developers interested in contributing to Project GlassFish, documenting unit tests become more important. Ashish latest blog entry describes how to Add Unit Tests for GlassFish using TestNG.

Project GlassFish has chosen TestNG for our tests. Several alternatives were considered, including JUnit. Some of the discussion can be read at the Quality Mailing List and here is Comparison Document which some have found useful. Check the The Quality Portal for more details.

Raj announced the new GlassFish Quality Portal. This includes a Developer Unit Testing that unifies the GlassFish test base around TestNG. More information in Raj's blog, including a call to participation.