• Palm Pre - This seems one of the best of the iPhone challengers - looks like a good OS, multi-tasking/touch, physics, nice design and a keyboard. See homepage, wikipedia, Gizmodo and PCWorld.
• Sony Vaio P - This one looks like a nice netbook, with a wide screen, build around a good sized keyboard. The use of a trackpoint means the whole thing can be sized just for the keyboard - would love to try it out. Competition for the "lesser" netbooks and the always rumored iPod tablet? See Gizmodo, Engadget.
• Dell Adiamo - This one (if the promise matches the buzz) would compete with MacBook Air; if it keeps with Dell's pricepoints, it would help with the pricing. See Gizmodo and Engdget.
• Windows 7 - This one, I hope will help keep Apple focused in doing a good job with MacOS. Ubuntu and, I'd hope soon, OpenSolaris, can help with the pressure, but I've felt that the quality of the desktop offerings from Apple has decreased since the iPod/iPhone started generating so much money, and they can use a strong competidor. See homepage and Gizmodo.

GlassFish includes EclipseLink as its default JPA implementation but works equally well with Hibernate. There are many users of Hibernate, so the question pops up regularly; Alexis provides an Update on the solution, and we are working on making this even easier to our users.

Merb is gaining traction and we are trying to be friendly to all frameworks; see the Merb RC3 Announcement that explicitly refers to improved GlassFish/JRuby support.

The future plans for Grizzly include NIO2 support (see Webinar on the topic); JFA has started a series of blog notes talking about Tricks and Tips with NIO2.

Earlier this year, during JavaOne, Kohsuke showed how to Embedded GlassFish v3. Byron is not now leading the effort and we recently started having Promoted Builds for the embedded binary. Check out Nazrul report on Support for Scattered WARs, plus the additional links.

Finally, it seems that The Beatles will come to RockBand. The details are stil unfolding but this would be the first time that The Beatles show in a digital franchise. I think this highlights the role that players like RockBand have to distribute IP, in a medium that is richer than the old mp3 player - and also harder to pirate. It is also a reminder of the value of distribution channels (in this case the RockBand store).

Arun shows how to use JSF 2.0 with GlassFish v2 in his Mojarra on GFv2. I believe the current thinking is that JSF 2.0 will not depend on Servlet 3.0 and will be able to run on Java EE 5 containers.

Atmosphere, JFA's new portable Comet framework, is now here; check the Announcement.

Jacob promised more JRuby frameworks and it seems that Rack Support is the first step. Rack provides an minimal interface between webservers supporting Ruby and Ruby frameworks, so things like, Merb, build on top of it. Seems a role equivalent to that of modjy in Jython?.

Jiandong shows how to use WS-Trust to Secure Web Services in Metro.

Yesterday's big announcement was T5440 (aka Batoka), a 4 socket, T2-based, 256 hardware threads, at 1.4GHz with up to 512GB memory, all in a 4U chassis! For techies, start with the posts by Allan and Josh, the T5440 WebSite and the Benchmarks. The press has nice reactions: [1], [2], [3]. Also check how to use it to Scale SugarCRM using Ldoms, and the new LDom cookbook. If you like it, give it a Free Try and Buy!.

Today, Apple announced the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Need to go check them out at the local Apple store, but I'm disappointed there is no Blu-Ray nor a sub-1K$ entry (in the new enclosure).

Roberto has provided a Schedule Update for JavaEE 6. As a brief summary: JAX-RS is in Final Draft, EJB 3.1 in Public Draft, and the remaining specs will also be in PD by end of October, and all the specs are planned to be final by JavaOne 09 (June 2-5, 2009).

Chris, in the UC2 team, has announced a new user-focused site for the multi-platform IPS-based tool. The IPSBestPractices site resides at Wikis.Sun.Com where it can leverage additional functional facilities and (equally more important) improved availability.

The latest Hudson builds (Download, ChangeLog) have new facilities for self-installing on Windows servers. Check Kohsuke's entries on Hudson 1.253 (the latest is 1.255) and Installing Hudson on Windows Got Easier.

BPEL is a key tool for users of tools like GlassFish ESB (site) but, as Adam points out, its diagrams are not necessarily at the ideal level. So, he has been exploring how to overlay some SVG diagrams over the BPEL ones. Check out Adam's Graphical Monitoring for BPEL 2 and give him feedback.

Finally, the retailers are already getting ready for Christmas so we are seeing the last batch of consumer-focused devices, including the latest E-Books: Sony's PRS 700 and Amazon's Kindle 2. The Sony looks prettier and has a touch-screen, but the G3 purchase connectivity of the Kindle is still very compelling. We will see...

From the Grizzly Community - much simpler mod_jk support in GlassFish v3 for improved Apache HTTPD as a front-end. And, an old story about the New Leadership on Grizzly 2.0 - Congrats, Alexey!

From Brazil, several GlassFish-related events during September, The Java Month: first we will have representation at JustJava and several of the 14-city tour, including a Visit by Kohsuke, and then, later in the month, by Arun including Sun TechDays in Sao Paolo. Contact Arun and Kohsuke if you want to leverage their visit.

And talking about Arun, a report on how to Run Typo on GlassFish/JRuby.

From Dave, news of him joining his two babies in a Social Roller; I know he has been iching to work on this for a while, looking forward to the results!

From the xVM Team, a new Home Page and White Paper.

And, from the land of Online Stores, two new developements: news of a New Kindle and noises about an Android App Store. The Kindle seems a sure (continued) winner; I'm curious about how Android will fare - a lot of competition out there!

From the OpenSSO team, there is now a free (just need an MySun Account) Self-Paced Downloadable Lab for learning how to use OpenSSO. The course is based on OpenSSO Express Build 5. This course uses OpenSSO Build 4.5, which provides identical functionality to OpenSSO Express Build 5 which supports Apache Tomcat, Sun WebServer and GlassFish v2. Check out SuperPat, Rajeev, or go direct to the source, David.

From Dave, presentations at OpenSource Days 2008 on Apache Roller and SocialSite. Plus Dave's Commentary on a note by Matt Asay on SocialSite.

From Kevin a report on Mural (the Master Data Management project at GlassFish) on its Support for MySQL.

From Ron our security master, an entry showing how to Use JACC to Determine Caller Roles, with detailed code snippets.

Finally, not our usual topic but the Engadget piece on the Google Phone got me in Gadgets mode: NYT report on Dream, Treo Pro, BlackBerry Black, HTC Touch and Xperia X1, WiFi PAN vs Bluetooth and Lenovo IdeaPad u8. I don't know how people can track all these! but then, I am not their target audience... check out my Cell Phone :-)

The successor to Thumper is SunFire x4500, faster and bigger than before but still the same storage/server hybrid.

The new storage family combines a Bunch of Disks (BoD) - SATA/SAS - and OpenSolaris/ZFS (and later Flash Memory), to deliver up to 72Gb/sec throughput and up to 192 SATA disks on 16RU at around 1$ per GB.