One of the unforeseen impacts of OpenSource on the developmet of GlassFish has been the large set of internet tools that we regularly use on it. Some of them are... • Code Analysis Tools like: SVNSearch, Ohloh, FishEye and FindBugs (old!) • Mail Archiving tools like: MarkMail and Nabble. • RSS Search Engines like Bloglines and Icerocket • Search tools like Google and Bing, with new variants like BingTweets.

What other internet tools do you use with GlassFish? BTW, the image at left is the Collaboration Graph, via SVNSearch.

Winston is asking for feedback on his proposal for a Generic Web Page Designer for NetBeans. The basic principle is to embed XULRunner (Wikipedia, Home, MozillaWiki, Tutorial, Use in Eclipse) into NetBeans. The notion seems reasonable but this is not my area, so, if you can provide feedback, please check out Winston's post. The actual NetBeans proposal is WebPageDesigner, the proposal for the prerequired embedding is EmbeddebBrowser.

I wrote about VisualVM yesterday (entry) but I had missed Octavian's Introduction where he gives instructions on how to use VisualVM on MacOS X. As a reminder, to run the VisualVM client you need a recent JVM, so you will need to use the latest JVM from Apple, but the app can run in a variety of JVMs, remote or local to VisualVM. VisualVM can even save the data into a snapshot and process it offline.

Check Octavian's Note for details.

VisualVM 1.0 is Now Available! VisualVM is a GUI-based, extensible, monitoring and performance analysis tool that is the next generation to the older, mostly CLI-based, tools in Sun's JDK distribution. VisualVM is part of the latest JDK: JDK 6 Update 7 (DZone, OnTheRecord, download) but it can monitor older JVMs.

Plug-ins are key to the success of VisualVM. They can be loaded directly from the tool and the current list includes a JConsole Container Plugin (for backward compatiblity), and Plugins for GlassFish, BTrace and a Thread Dump Analyzer.

For more information check out:

• VisualVM home site, ScreenCast at JavaOne, Features.
• Plugins: web page, Docs.
• Overviews at InfoQ and DZone
• Overview/Intro Blogs: Octavian, Luis-Miguel
• Regular bloggers in the topic include Luis-Miguel and Geertjan

Talking a bit more with Andi and Kirill after posting From Russia with Love they pointed me to the OpenESB Wiki page on Dynamic Services Composition describing the experiment. There is also a live sample you can try. The whole thing is in early experimentation phase; the sample is pure layout, it does nothing yet, but I'm highlighting it here because it might elicit other groups to think of synergies with this effort. Check it out and give us feedback.

Check out this teaser screencast from Kirill on Fuji Tooling. The whole Fuji effort feels right on target. I think the next few months are going to be very interesting as the effort for Fuji and OpenESB ramps up. BTW, I need to check on Kirill about how modern-day Russians feel about old movies like From Russia With Love, although in this one the bad guys are S.P.E.C.T.R.E.!

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.

This interview with Ludo Champenois from the GlassFish team discusses the general developer experience with GlassFish as well as with IDEs such as NetBeans and Eclipse. We go into the save/reload paradigm for web and Ajax apps (using jMaki for instance), incremental deployment possibilities, value and role of IDEs for Java EE 5, best OS for developers, and more. You can subscribe to this podcast by searching for "glassfish" on the iTunes online store, by clicking here or using this feed for by any other podcatcher.

Sailfin development is moving along nicely and so is it's tooling part now with SIP Application Development Module version 0.2 for NetBeans 6.0 and a detailed installation document. •  new is a "Converged Servlet Application" project template. •  full specifications are listed in this document. As detailed in this document, the next sailfin milestone build in December is Feature freeze.

Vivek provides a good summary of tooling options in Metro. NetBeans 6 provides support for simple Hello World to adding different Quality of Service along with .NET 3.0 interoperability. Within Eclipse, you can use either of SOAP UI plugin, Ant build script, CLI or Maven-based tools. The last three options are available for use outside the IDE as well.

Let us know if you are interested in writing a Metro plugin for Eclipse.

JBuilder 2007 now supports GlassFish: • JBuilder Product Page and FAQ (PDF). • Also check DavidI's blog .

One of the primary ways to technology adoption is making it available on a wide variety of tools. jMaki enabled web applications can be easily developed and deployed using NetBeans IDE already. This new screencast shows how jMaki plug-in can be installed in Eclipse 3.3. It also shows how the rich set of widgets from different toolkits can be added to a web application using drag-and-drop and deployed on GlassFish, all from within Eclipse.

Let us know if you are interested in developing a jMaki plug-in for IDE of your choice.

Several projects in the GlassFish community use Japex to run micro-benchmarks, sometimes taking advantage of additional tools like Hudson and WStest. In this month's Tech Tip, Deep and Bharath describe in detail how to use Japex and WStest to do performance regression test on Web Services. Japex has been very useful in building GlassFish (blogs) and we are seing increased interest in contributing to it. Check it out!

NetBeans 6 now has its last Milestone (M10) available. If you haven't already tried NetBeans 6, you'll find a new editor (for Java, XML, JSP, etc...) and a new modularized installer among many other improvements. The archive varies from 23MB to 172MB depending on the features you request. GlassFish version 2 build 53 is integrated in the install process. GlassFish-related new features in M10 are described in this earlier post. Java EE improvements include: •  Integrated Visual Web designer for HTML, JSP, etc... •  Much improved Visual Web performance •  Enhanced JavaScript and CSS support •  Greater web services support •  Support Project Woodstock component library

Other new features are listed in the New and Noteworthy document. Overall stability and performance are also improved as with every Milestone. This is the last Milestone with a beta set for August and final bits in November.

Eclipse 3.3 Europa is now final and supports configuring GlassFish V1, V2 and V3 using pluggable adapters for WTP 2.0 which now supports Java EE 5 development. From the GlassFishPlugins project at java.net: This adapter is Java EE 5 compliant and works with GlassFish V1, V2, V3, and supports all EE 5 features of Eclipse 3.3, and supports Web application directory deployment, and fully integrated debugger.

Read a detailed writeup, with screenshots, from Ludo on how to configure the adapter, deploy a Web application and debug a JSP page on GlassFish V2 - all from within Eclipse Europa. The writeup can also be watched as a screencast and additionally shows how to deploy a JAX-WS based Web service using the Deployment Descriptor-free Web services deployment.

GlassFish and Eclipse relationship can be tracked in Earlier Posts at TheAquarium.