Metro, the Web Services stack, is one of the main components in GlassFish. One of its key benefits is excellent WebServices interoperability with the Microsoft stack, leveraging our relationship with MS. A consequence is showings in informal publications from Microsoft, like mszCool's Plans for 2009 and Identity Interoperability as well as in formal Federated Identity and Healthcare in the MS's The Architecture Journal. On a related note, O'Reilly has published Java Web Services: Up and Running - A quick, practical, and thorough introduction where Martin Kalin covers SOAP and RESTful Web Services in Java using Metro and Jersey.

For WebServices discussions, check out our Forum, and the mailing lists USERS@Metro and USERS@Jersey. Although we consider Jersey a piece of Metro - we love SOAP and REST equally :-) and the two parts are intended to mesh together - we are maintaining two mailing lists as the audiences tend to be disjoint.

Heard on the IBM's DeveloperWorks: After struggling with Eclipse and WASCE for 1 week, I've moved onto Glassfish and Netbeans. Let me just say Glassfish and Netbeans just works. I can create JAX-WS and REST web services very easily. I don't think I'll be touching WASCE for a while.

Thomas announced that JBossWS 2.1.0 will support Metro, the GlassFish WS Stack (Thomas' blog, Vivek's). Other uses include GF v2 (and SJS AS 9.1), TmaxSoft JEUS 6 and WebLogic Server 10. Metro is designed to be extensible and integrateable and also works on Jetty and Tomcat - I'd venture it should not be hard to use inside Geronimo, so let us know if you attempt that effort.

PS - The map shown is that of Barcelona's Metro. It does not include the future Linea 9.

SalesForce.COM had looked at JAX-WS a while ago and had found it lacking but they looked at it again very recently and they just posted a JAX-WS QuickStart kit using the JAX-WS RI from GlassFish.

I hope the new toolkit works for them. For details on the announcement, check the SalesForce blog and also Arun's. And do let us know if you are in a similar situation and want to consider switching to the GlassFish WebServices implementation!

In a related area, our JSON support might be also useful to a case like SalesForce. Switching implementations on the server-side is always trickier but perhaps one could pass through the request from a new, JAX-WS RI, JSON-enabled, endpoint to the existing endpoint...

BEA has released WebLogic Server 10.0, as a Technology Preview for their Java EE 5 support. The specific versions of the JCP specs supported are listed here and the Java EE 5 Web Services technologies are well represented since BEA is using the GlassFish implementations for JAX-WS 2.0, and JAXB 2.0, which were part of GlassFish v1 UR1 (latest release).

The one major area I see not yet up-to-date is the Web Tier: JSF, Servlet, JSP (see the Java EE 5 list of technologies), but BEA has repeatedly expressed their interest in fully supporting the latest standards, so stay tuned. They should also be incorporating soon the latest Web Services stack, with is part of GlassFish v2.

Congratulations to BEA and looking forward to further cooperation. And thanks to Jaime for the Tip.