It's been a hard year, but the GlassFish community has kept pushing v3 onward and all the indicators are that the result is very much worth the effort. The target date for GlassFish v3 is mid-December so the last few weeks have been very busy - check out these MarkMail charts: • DEV - last month was really close to an all-time record. • ISSUES - an easy all-time record. • QUALITY - highest since Sept'08. Plenty of progress to highlight from there; below are some.

Final Branch:

• Next Build and Branch for Final Release (Abhijit)
• No More Commits on v3 Trunk and Workspace Now Open for Commits (Jane)
• Hudson Branch Jobs Now Published (Terena)

If you are curious, peek at the hudson dashboard; it has plenty of very interesting jobs, including the nice progress on findbugs.

The FishCAT folks really deserve their own spotlights (soon), but see:

• Start Testing b73 ... and b74 (Judy) (and Survey on FishCAT)
• Latest build for GF Tools Bundle for Eclipse 1.2 (Ludo), and
• v3 + UC Issue: Latest ... Bundle for Eclipse 1.2 (Kampmeier)

And, from the doc team, final reviews of:

• ...GFv3 Application Deployment Guide (Dixie)
• ... Admin Guide (Dixie)
• ... v3 Documentation (Paul)

In a recursive manner, the JCP Process (latest version is 2.6) is used to change the JCP process. The latest set of changes are a relatively small Maintenance Release on the original JSR 215. Check the Formal ChangeLog or see this Summary by Heather.

The changes are emphasizing transparency and reflect best practices followed by different EGs through the years. IIRC, the first EG that followed transparency at this level was JDOM (JSR-102), led by Jason Hunter. In more recent times, I think that Paul and Marc have done an excellent job with JAX-RS (JSR-311). I hope the improved rules will encourage many more good examples.

The JCP has implemented the new "inactive" status label for JSRs. From the announcement: ... the new "inactive" status label for JSRs which we announced last month has just been applied to non-final JSRs that have not posted a milestone within the last 18 months. The JCP pages have already been updated; check out the JSRs by Stage and the full list of Inactive JSRs. The list includes JSRs led by large and small companies, Sun and non-Sun. Some of the JSRs are very old, some just break the 18month boundary.

I think this is a very good move; some of the JSRs should just be closed, but some others are very important ones and I'd love to see them make progress - browse through the list and decide by yourself.

Bill has announced the creation of a New Arch Mailing List for GlassFish. Quoting Bill: The purpose of this mailing list is to discuss architectural issues for GlassFish. You might ask "what is software architecture? ... The software architecture of a program or computing system is the structure or structures of the system, which comprise software components, the externally visible properties of those components, and the relationships between them.

This is a very important step for GlassFish. Architectural discussions were the last set of engineering discussions happening inside Sun; if you think you can contribute your expertise, please consider participating.

The basic arrangement for the GlassFish AppServer is: sources are external (to Sun), we use Hudson on internal machines to build and run all our tests, then push out the builds out for everybody to use. This arrangement works well for everybody except that it is hard to track the build status from outside of Sun, but that has now been fixed thanks to a new Build Publisher plugin contributed by a group at JBoss.

Check out the build dashboard and Kohsuke's Announcement. The plugin was discussed a few days ago in a Separate Post, and I clarified that it would qualify for the GlassFish Awards Program; I think it is a very useful plugin.

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.

It is extra important to be transparent when there are issues - not just when things go well - so everybody can adjust as soon as possible. We already mentioned the Slip on GFv2 beta; here is another issue... You may have noticed a change in the JAX-WS 2.1 Download Link. In a nutshell, we found an unexpected change in a W3C spec we depended on just a bit too late; we had some personal rotation and we Lost the Baton. In the meantime, please use the nightly; full details here.

This is short notice, but, this morning (9am US Pacific time) Kohsuke will present at the latest User Experience meeting. He will be discussing his recent experiences in Tool Automation on GlassFish vs Tomcat. Please consider attending, or following up on one of the email threads on this topic. Meeting logistics and future agendas are in the User Experience Wiki Page. We are still figuring out how to make these meetings as useful and practical as possible, so constructive feedback on that would be appreciated.