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Thursday February 12, 2009

6.7 and GlassFish v3

In yesterday's entry, I talked about some new features in the GlassFish integration module for NetBeans 6.7. I will be honest... they were a bit underwhelming.

In this entry, I want to introduce an early access feature: Support for GlassFish v3!

Since this is early access, I have disabled v3 support, by default. If you want to see the v3 support, you will need to apply a special flag to the command-line used to start the IDE. The flag is:

Once the flag is set, you will start to see 'GlassFish v3' appear in the UI. It will be near/next to 'GlassFish v3 Prelude', in many cases.

Let's take a look at some of the changes.

1. v3 Appears in the Servers List
   

   This is pretty self explanatory...

2. Download Now gets the latest promoted build
   

   The bits come from http://download.java.net/glassfish/v3/promoted/latest-glassfish.zip. Since this URL always points to the latest promoted build, you can use the 'Download Now' button to keep up with changes in v3 very easily. If you are registering a GlassFish v3 Prelude instance, the 'Download Now' button will download the latest release of GlassFish v3 Prelude... just like you should expect.

3. Masquerading is a not allowed
   

   If you have chosen to register v3, you cannot point at a v3 Prelude install. If you have chosen to register v3 Prelude, you cannot point at a v3 install. While their names are similar, the two servers are radically different.

4. More Java EE support

   GlassFish v3 will eventually support the full spectrum of Java EE projects and the integration allows you to create projects that target a v3 server instance. Pay special attention to the word eventually in the previous sentence. The latest builds of GlassFish v3 are still not ready to support all of Java EE 5, so you will run into bugs while developing and deploying Java EE projects onto v3. Please be patient.
   

   
   Create an EJB Module project that targets GlassFish v3
   
   Create an Application Client project that targets GlassFish v3
   
   Create an Enterprise Application project that targets GlassFish v3
5. Autoregistration of GlassFish v3

   To autoregister a GlassFish v3 server instance, you can set the flag:

   -J-Dorg.glassfish.v3ee6.installRoot=<INSTALL-ROOT>
   If you do set this flag, you do not need to set the enableExperimentalFeatures flag, but you can if you want to....

One important thing to note about GlassFish v3 that is different from Glassfish v3 Prelude is the JDK requirements. GlassFish v3 Prelude could run under JDK 5. NetBeans 6.7 will also be able to run under JDK 5. GlassFish v3 requires JDK 6... so you may run into this error message when you attempt to start a registered v3 instance.

Error dialog

You can set the 'Java Executable' instance property to work-around this issue.

One final note: the NetBeans support for v3 is experimental and v3 is not even feature complete at this point. This is definitely the 'bleeding edge'. You will run into bugs. Expect them. When you hit one, please file it, but please include some hint that you are running with experimental features enabled.

Update: Account for name change

(2009-02-12 00:01:01.0) Permalink