Catching up with news from before JavaOne: Pentaho Announced support for GlassFish v2 for Pentaho BI Platform. Note that Pentaho is one of the more than 40 initial companies listed in the new Sun Partner Program for GlassFish.

Memcached is the popular distributed cache system (often used with MySQL) that was developed for LiveJournal (Article, Wikipedia, Website). One of many sites using memcached is BSC and Dave has two recent writeups on the topic: The Roller Caching API, and Using Memcached with Roller. And, on this topic, there has been good progress in the Webstack optimizing memcached for Solaris. Check Trond's articles on Configuration, the Latest Release and more. Also don't miss Patrick's Latest release of the Memcached Functions for MySQL.

Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE), the Sun OpenSolaris-based distribution for Solaris, Java, and Web 2.0 developers has a new release out: 1/08. Ludo has a post about the integrated web stack as well as a 10-minute screencast. After giving SMF privileges for Apache/mySQL servers, Ludo shows how the user can use a very simple graphical tool to start/stop and configure services. He also walks you through a small PHP/jMaki/Ajax pre-packaged demo with a mySQL backend. He finally uses NetBeans' PHP support and auto-registering of the AMP-stack to author and debug a simple PHP application. Pretty slick!

SXDE also comes with the NetBeans 6/GlassFish v2 pre-configured bundle and if you're using the VMWare image, I would recommend upgrading the amount of memory from 512 to 2Gb. And in case you're wondering, the VMWare image password for root is SXDE (see also the FAQ).

Check out also Ludo's previous interview on GlassFish tooling.

While GlassFish is written in Java and shipping on Windows, Solaris, Linux, MacOS, and more recently AIX, choosing the right operating system is often orthogonal to the choice of your application server. This article on GlassFish and Solaris Containers by Sonny Hastomo shows how to combine the zone virtualization technology with GlassFish. It uses a non-global zone for glassfish and documents how to partition the CPU resource.

• Adoption News: It just works, China, Gartner • Web Services: Jersey and REST, Metro and SOAP • Wanted: UpdateCenter Ideas • Learning: Intro to OpenMQ, JMS 102, GF Book. • Tips: Where is my Servlet? • GlassFish v3 Progress: Maven, Mephisto, GFv3 GEM, Java EE 6 • Other: Solaris and Dell

Yesterday's big announcement was that Dell was going to distribute Solaris on some PowerEdge servers. check out Jonathan's blog and Barton's History line. As JimG points out, this is a good validation of the benefits of widespread adoption of a technology. For additional info, check Sun's Press Release and this eWeek article.

Now, what I want is to see more hardware and software companies OEMing the GlassFish AppServer! We already have Ubuntu, drop me an email if you are interested :-)

When it comes to clustering in an application server, defining the vocabulary is the first thing that needs to be done. This new article does this and much more. It defines key concepts for GlassFish such as Domain Administration Server (DAS), Node Agents, server instances, discusses deployment topologies, and explains how the Shoal and JXTA technologies are used to set up the cluster and replicate data in-memory. It also provides instructions on how to get the GlassFish "Cluster" profile running.

The second article explains how the application server can take advantage of the Zones technology built in Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris. It has a quick intro on what are Solaris zones and how they provide isolated environments for application instances. Propagation among zones can complicate installations and updates, so the article going into the details of installing and using the GlassFish application server in a global or a sparse zone. It also covers upgrading from previous versions of the software that may have come bundled with Solaris.

Virtualization is really hot now. We recently mentioned about Using LDOMs to partition a T2-based system. This week's annoncement of Solaris 10 8/07 includes New Zones Features including BrandZ Zones. The first BrandZ (lX) allows Running Linux Apps on Solaris (see earlier news). A new announcement is Project Etude which enables Solaris 8 Apps running as guests on a Solaris 10 host; see Marc's Business Overview and Dan's Technical Overview. Also see these reviews at Dr. Dobb's, The Register and EnterpriseLinux.

Added: Also see the announcement about Windows and Solaris virtualization.

I am planning to start highlighting some of our regular contributors from around the world.

Number 9 (Dick Davies) regularly covers GlassFish and Solaris from the UK. I like his posts, they are useful, very detailed and tie things nicely together.

Some of Number 9's blogs on GlassFish include:

• Adding SSL Keypairs to Java Keystores
• Sharing JVMs Across Zones
• Roller on GlassFish
• SMF GlassFish on Port 80
• DTracing Zoned JVMs
• GlassFish in a Zone

Check out Number 9, specially if you are using (or are considering using) GlassFish on Solaris!

PS - I am not sure why the blog is called number 9; my best guess would be because of Hello, Operator from The White Stripes, but I'm sure Dick will correct me :-)... While searching I also found this very Nice Set of Photos) posted by a Number 9!

Dick Davis (Rasputkin) is the author of Number 9 where he covers a number of topics, including hardware, Solaris and System Administration.

Dick had some reservations about J2EE but RoR on GF and the GF v2 beta contest encouraged him to give GlassFish a try and he seems to like it so far. Dick's first GF-related blog explains in detail how to start GlassFish on a Zone. Since then he wrote another good one, explaining how to Use DTrace on JVMs and applying this to GlassFish.

Solaris Zones and GlassFish mix well together. For example, the GlassFish Wiki just moved to its new location, a GlassFish instance on a Solaris Zone, and John has written quite a bit about GlassFish and Zones.