Anybody that has been in the software industry for any time knows that roadmaps are always "work in progress". With that caveat, here are the latest news: • GFv2 UR2, this Thursday (wiki page, Msg) • GFv2.1, moved out to Fall 08 (wiki page, Harpreet's blog, Msg) • GFv3 TP2, JavaOne 08 (wiki page) GFv2 UR2 has a bunch of bug fixes so you should consider it if you are using GFv2. GFv2.1 will continue to be aligned and driven by Sailfin.

GFv3 TP2 is a "Technology Preview" release; we will provide a sneak peak at CommunityOne and will be demoed at JavaOne.

Added - GFv2 UR2 has been pushed out til Monday.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, April 1st 2008, 9am PST, 6pm CET, 5pm GMT is the monthly OpenDS meeting and Gilles Bellaton will present on OpenDS replication. Check the details in Ludo's Post Also check Ludo's Call For Votes on OpenDS Issues.

PS - Tomorrow is April Fool's Day. Sun used to have Very Elaborate jokes (I remember the All The Wood Behind One Arrow). The fun seems to be back at Sun, let's see what happens tomorrow...

OpenDS, the project to produce a 100% Java-based LDAP directory now has a proposed roadmap for version 1.0 and beyond. Apart from monitoring through SNMP, all features are already in the current release (v1.0 Milestone 1 from Feb. 27, 2008). Final release for v1.0 is scheduled for May 2008. Ludo Poitou has more details. In other OpenDS news, Tomonori Shioda has posted the Japanese translation of no less than four OpenDS technical posts. Ludo has a list of them.

The illustration is a photograph from the late 18th century of a "feuille de route" (roadmap) picture for convicts once they've served their sentence. The road to liberty in a sense. I'm sure JeanFrancois appreciates the use of a truly French word here ;-)

Ludo just posted an OpenDS Roadmap to the USERS alias. The latest OpenDS 1.0 builds (b12, b11, etc) are looking very good, so the plan is for a Milestone 1 within the next few days, a M2 in a month, and an official 1.0 release in May 2008 - which, by a coincidence, is also when J1 2008 happens :-) Check out the road map and provide feedback on all aspects, including critical issues in b12 and the initial cut at the OpenDS 2.0 features.

I have not posted on OpenDS in a bit so here are some highlights I've noticed:

• Continued progress on documentation: see a Summary of 2007 Activity.
• Helping contributions: Wiki page on How to Build and Run OpenDS within NetBeans (also see Mark and Ludo commentary).
• A lot of work on performance - for example, see this note on Search Performance.
• And, for extra points, OpenDS and VirtualBox: OpenDS on OpenSolaris on VirtualBox on MacOS X 10.5.2 on MacBook Pro.

Virtualization - Russian Dolls for geeks :-)

The RoadMap for Metro is now available. Metro 1.0.1, a small bug-fix release, is part of GlassFish v2UR1 (should be out next week) and Metro 1.1 is almost ready, with bigger changes and targeted for GFv2.1. The roadmap goes all the way through Metro 2.1 and it correlates the JAX-WS RI, WSIT, Metro, Jersey, GlassFish and NetBeans. A major change is that there will no longer be separate releases of WSIT. Vivek provides context in his writeup with full details in the Roadmap document. Note that there are simultaneous Metro release trains, with stable releases interwoven with early accesses of newer

PS, if you like maps, I think you should check out the Tabula Peutingeriana: it is a 13th century copy of the Cursus Publicus, used by the Roman Couriers. It really shows that All Roads Lead to Rome. The full-res version is particularly impressive.

I've written down a GlassFish Roadmap Overview. The releases covered include GlassFish v1, v2, v2 UR1, SailFin, its yet-unnamed GlassFish companion, and GlassFish v3. Do note that the schedules on most of these releases are tentative and some of the releases are uncommitted. Still, I hope that you will find the roadmap useful.

The GlassFish v2 beta 2 bits are now available. For the curious out there, it's build 41d (beta 2 candidate 5).

New in GlassFish v2:
•  Clustering, Load Balancing, High Availability (HA)
•  Microsoft interoperability with Web Services Interoperability Technology (WSIT)
•  Improved Performance
•  Next-generation Web with Ajax, Scripting, and RESTful Web services

New in Beta 2:
• Fixed many bugs between beta1 and beta2
• Fixed performance issue with in-mem replication feature
• Admin GUI is now fully feature complete
• More modules in GF update center

Schedule: Final release date (latest estimate) is September 17th.

Tools: The recommended NetBeans version is 5.5.1 (RC1) although NetBeans 6 Milestone 9 also bundles GlassFish v2 beta 2.

Here are the new proposed dates for GlassFish v2: •  beta1 - today (March 12th, 2007) •  beta2 - early May •  beta3 - mid-June •  fcs - August

Beta1 is a solid beta for developers (see this review at TSS) and works very well in developer profile. Beta1 works well in cluster profile for a small number of nodes but encounters issues in larger (> 4) clusters. Also, the performance degradation of enabling memory replication is higher than what we want.

Beta2 is a refresh before JavaOne that will fix the clustering / replication issues and should be very solid. We understand the fixes needed, so we have confidence in the schedule.

Beta3 is fully featured and bomb-proof and it is targetted to everybody, including those enterprises that are exploiting the 5-9's availabilty in SJS AS 8.2. Hopefully beta3 will just be beta2, but we will be doing a lot of testing in many configurations and arrangements, including taking advantage of HADB and testing against all the components in Java Enteprise System 5.

The GlassFish Wiki will contain the new roadmap within a couple of days.

A quick update on the GlassFish v2 beta. As you may remember, the original date was Feb 26th. We could not make that date, but it now seems we have new stable date for March 12th (next Monday) and we have updated the Milestone Wiki Page. Pushing out beta means that FCS will have to adjust; we hope to have new dates for FCS by next monday - stay tuned.