Yesterday, Liferay released version 5.1.0 of Liferay Portal [download]. This latest release incorporates a number of new features, including features and bugfixes contributed from Project WebSynergy (e.g. the portlet container). Future releases will continue to incorporate components such as WSRP 2.0, SAW, and presence components (all of which are present in the foundation of Project WebSynergy). As of 5.1.0, Liferay is now bundled with GlassFish v2 and GlassFish v3 [Download Now]! It's a lightweight (33% reduction in size), platform-neutral download that demonstrates the power and modularity of GlassFish v3, with a real-world app. Kudos to the Sun and Liferay team!

We now have one-pagers for all the main features in GlassFish Server v3. Check them out and consider providing feedback through these mail threads: • Anissa on Admin Console • Hong on Deployment • Rajeshwar on REST interface • Prashanth on Monitoring • Sreeni on Pluggability • Sahoo on OSGi • Byron on Embeddability

The GlassFish Server has implemented Server-Side Includes since early GFv2 (see Feb 07 entry); starting with GFv3 this feature will be supported formally. Check Shing Wai's SSI Announcement where he describes how to create SSI files and how to enable and configure their processing. Enjoy!

All public GlassFish Server releases are developed transparently (also see Our Enterprise Support). GlassFish v3 is no different, it just took a bit longer to automate because of the new build system. To get to the public builds for GlassFish v3 check out: • Promoted Build • Nightly Build The console is currently available through this Workaround. And, yes, those bundles are really 20-24MBs!

The EclipseLink team has released EclipseLink 1.0. This release will be incorporated into a future version of GFv3. See earlier EclipseLink Posts and check out the Release Announcement.

The first Milestone of NetBeans 6.5 is now Available for Download. This release includes support for Groovy, Ruby, Spring, Hibernate, JPA and more, and GlassFish v3. Check New and Noteworthy for full details, but, arguably one of the most important additions is PHP support. See Overview Screencast, Documentation and the NetBeans/PHP Blog.

Some people know they want a full JavaEE 5 AppServer - and for those, the GlassFish Server is a better choice than Apache Tomcat, but, even if you only want a subset of these APIs, check out Alexis' Tomcat Today, GlassFish Tomorrow. Also check out Wang Yu's Blocking and Non-Blocking IO article that, like Scott's More on the simple vs. the complex, shows the benefits of NIO as workload increases.

Ryan has written two more notes on his JSF 2.0 Preview series. Collecting them all chronologically for ease of references: • Part 1 - Packaging / Project Staging • Part 2.1 - Resources • Part 2.2 - Resource APIs • Part 2.3 - Resources and EL • Part 3 - Publish/Subscribe Event System (just added) • Part 4 - Resource Re-location (just added)

Ryan is also leading the Mojarra Implementation, the production-ready, Reference Implementation that will be used in GlassFish v3, and he also just announced the Early Access Implementation.

JSF's adoption seems to continue to be strong and to grow. I am beginning to think the adoption is bimodal, it depends very much on what market/geography one considers. For example, see Kito's JSF Jobs writeup.

Note: also see reviews/summaries of Ryan's posts by Ed and in earlier TA's spotlights: here and here.

Adam Bien has turned to be one of the most active advocates for GlassFish. He is very active at his Adam Bien and in presentations everywhere. One of his latest entries explains how to Embed GFv3 for testing purposes. The title summarizes it: "Embedding Glassfish V3 in Unit Test - Two Jars, Three Lines Of Code And Five Seconds Start With Deployment" (link). The ability to embed GlassFish v3 is going to open many new opportunities for GlassFish. For example, Tom Rose also mentions the ease of use and fast start-up time. If you are embedding GlassFish v3, drop us an email; we are interested.

Eclipse Ganymede (Eclipse 3.4, see News and Noteworthy) is out in the annual late-June Eclipse synchronous release. Ganymede works with GlassFish v2 and v3 and Arun's latest note provides Detailed Steps for GFv3. Based on previous experience, the June Eclipse releases tend to be a bit rough, but they should get much better later in the year. As, always, we are interested in your feedback and direct experience.

Earlier in the year Ryan (Mr JSF RI/Mojarra) started a series on the new JSF 2.0 features. Ryan's first entry covered the notion of Project Stages and then he started on Resources. The first entry on that series covered Packaging and the next one was on the APIs backing resources. Ryan just published a last entry in that series: Accessing Resources from Expression Language. Since Ryan is also the implementer all these examples are grounded in the RI and he privately told me that there should be an EA release out "any day now". Stay tuned and we will let you know.

The GFv3 TP2 release had a small refresh to get a new, OpenInstaller-based GUI installer. No other changes. Download instructions at the same location as before.

Grizzly 1.8.0 is out and this one has a lot of new material, including GWT support, better OSGi Compliance, improved Comet Support, improved performance, SPI cleanup and many more (see JFA's note). Grizzly 1.8.0 has already been pushed into the latest GFv3 builds. Also see the Release Thread and the complete ChangeLog. Congrats to JFA, Oleksiy, and the rest of the team and community.

Arun has a blog entry up announcing the availability of the JavaOne '08 "TicTacToe" demo from the glassfish-scripting site. The source code for the Java EE, Rails and Grails applications are all available along with some documentation. What makes this demo interesting is GlassFish v3's fast startup, dynamic behavior (loading the web container, the JRubyOnRails or the Groovy runtimes on demand), but also how multiple applications written in different languages and frameworks can be hosted in the same environment while sharing things such as a comet context.

Arun and the team are taking feedback on webtier-AT-glassfish.dev.java.net or on the GlassFish WebTier Forum. If this scripting topic is of interest to you, you should probably follow Vivek's blog, the Scripting for GlassFish lead.

The JSF 2.0 Expert Group is soliciting feedback on their Early Access Draft. The review started on June 2nd (yesterday) and will run until July 2nd. Draft specification is available ; additional details at the JSR 314 JCP Page. Ryan and the team are working on an EA of the implementation for people to try out. I believe we will try to make it available at both the UC 1 and the UC 2 repositories.