Several people have posted instructions on how to install Roller on GlassFish - my favorite is probably still the entry from number 9 - but I'm very happy to read from Dave (Roller Strong #6) that he is incorporating specific instructions on GlassFish in the latest Roller Installation Guide. If you have a chance, check them out and give him feedback...

I discovered Number 9 when Dick first gave GlassFish a try on a Solaris Zone. It worked but his initial evaluation was a "bit guarded"... I still won’t be surprised to find it floating upside down tomorrow. And, 45 days after that initial post... the fish is still not dead!

Since his original post, Dick has written about how to use GlassFish with DTrace, Service Management Facility (SMF(5)). His latest post explains how to deploy Roller on it.

All Number 9 entries are very clear and easy to read. They are even nicely formatted, which is not always the case for many bloggers. Check them out!

Previously, Marina and Seema showed you how to run Roller on Web Server 6.1. They've teamed up again to tell you how to run Roller 3.0 on the recently released Web Server 7.0! You can read all about it here.

It all started with Dave "Roller" Johnson writing about Roller generating JSON. Alexis picked it up in his jMakifying Roller entry and short video. Some limitations found in this quick hack were addressed in this follow-up entry and in the jMaki day presentations. Neat!! In another example combining JSON and jMaki Jennifer show how to load a table from JSON. Don't miss the comments for the entry, they are also useful. In many case XML is still a no-brainer, but the increased adoption of JavaScript on the client makes JSON an interesting lingua franca for web apps. And, in cases where JavaScript is also used on the server-side (e.g. Phobos) JSON seems the most natural format for structured data exchange.

More OpenDS contributions; this one is from Trey showing how to use OpenDS with Roller, with some help from Dave. Start by Downloading OpenDS, then configure it for GlassFish and you can use this LDIF data set to preconfigure it (what is LDIF). Full details at Trey's blog, and more TheAquarium entries under the OpenDS tag. Given my previous entry on Trees or Tables, a drawing of Yggdrasil seemed appropriate.

We started TheAquarium on Nov 30th, 2005. Some time after that I wrote a Brief Guide to TheAquarium, but over time (and over 1160 entries), the format has changed, so time for a quick update.

The biggest change is a big reduction and a reinterpretation of categories and the adoption of tags. Items are now placed on the category that most closely matches the community that generate them, while we are using tags quite aggressively to cluster the items themselves. The most popular tags are found on the right hand side of the blog pages; a full list can be found at the Search Tools page.

Tags can be used to retreive News and Feeds, and multiple tags can be used. The structure of the URLs was standarized in Roller 3.1 (see Roller Wiki Proposal); here is a cheatsheet:

•  TheAquarium WebLog - http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium
•  Corresponding RSS feed - http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/feed/entries/rss
•  Entries for a given category http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/category/OpenSSO
•  Corresponding RSS feed - http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/feed/entries/rss?category=OpenSSO
•  Entries with given tags - http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/tags/glassfish+adoption
•  Corresponding RSS feed - http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/feed/entries/rss?tags=glassfish+adoption
•  A specific entry - http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/entry/shoal_is_out
•  Entries for a given month - http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/date/200511
•  Entries for a given day - http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/date/20051205

We use the tag frontpage to indicate news that are specially worthy. For example, here is a feed to all the front page news about glassfish. Note you may encounter some old entries that have not been tagged properly yet as we are converting them to tags lazily.

Feeds are available in both RSS and Atom formats. The examples above use RSS but to get the Atom feeds just replace rss with atom in the URLs.

Finally, you may want to also track our new blog on Adoption Stories (corresponding RSS feed).

Added:

•  Feed on all comments: http://blogs.sun.com/main/feed/comments/rss
•  Feed on TheAquarium comments: http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/feed/comments/rss

TheAquarium covers many topics and, although some of our readers may be interested in all these, others will not. Categories do not really work, because the entries typically fall under multiple categories, but tags should fit perfectly. Linda just reported that Tagging will Soon be Available to blogs.sun.com, so expect us to start using them soon after that. This new functionality will enable us to tag news according to importance and scope, which opens new uses of our feeds. For example, interested NetBeans users should be able to link a subfeed from TheAquarium into their welcome screen.

We are seing a very fast transition to the new Java Persistence API. The containers are almost all there, starting with the JPA Reference Implementation in GlassFish, which is Almost Final and available with GlassFish and as a Separate Bundle. See Marina's Blog for directions on how to use it, and also Other TA entries.

Other groups are moving very fast too. Hibernate supports JPA ([1], [2], [3]), and BEA's Kodo is also in good shape. The Apache community is also moving in that direction; they seem to be lagging a bit but I expect them to move quickly soon (Cayenne, Open JPA).

The extra, and important, benefit of JPA is that it is possible to Mix and Match. We have already started testing the GF RI with other containers, and other JPA implementations with GlassFish.

All this creates an ideal situation for the customers, and I expect a move towards replacing the Hibernate-specific dependencies with standard-based, JPA, dependencies, as described in Spring and JPA or in Roller and Hibernate. And new applications, like NetBeans and CRUD, are all written against JPA. Interesting times ahead!