GlassFish @ Bangalore, Chennai and Pune - Metro, jMaki & JRuby

I presented on GlassFish and other
related technologies (Metro,
jMaki and
JRuby) in
Bangalore, Chennai and Pune
last
week. The slides used during the preso are

here. And here is the list of questions (along with answers) for you:

1. What does WSIT offer ?
   
   
   
   WSIT stands for Web Services
   Interoperability Technology. It is a component of
   Metro - the Web services stack in
   GlassFish. WSIT specifically provides support for
   Security, Reliability, Transactions and interoperability with .NET 3.0. A
   number of
   screencasts are available to get you started with Metro and enable all
   the enterprise features mentioned using
   NetBeans IDE.

2. Is Metro plugin available for NetBeans version < 6.0 ?
   
   
   
   
   Yes, Metro plugin is available for NetBeans 5.5.1. This is clearly explained
   in
   screencast
   #ws4. NetBeans 6.0 is now
   released and is the recommended version of the IDE.

3. How do I use LDAP for authentication while using Metro based web service
   (with Security Token Service) interoperating with .NET web service?
   
   
   
   Security Token Service (STS) can be configured for LDAP authentication. STS
   service end can be protected with
   Sun Java System
   Access Manager web service agent (JSR 196 plugin). It can validate and
   authenticate the incoming user name token (username / password) against
   configured LDAP store at STS service side (when Access Manager is hosted as
   STS) and then issue the corresponding SAML token. You could also write
   AuthenticationValidator plugin to STS service, that can access and validate
   incoming username / password against Access Manager LDAP store using
   Access
   Manager Client SDK.
4. Do Metro support Kerberos?
   
   
   
   Metro 1.0 does not support Kerberos. However the
   
   latest nightly builds of Metro provide
   
   Kerberos support.
5. I want to contribute to GlassFish. Which areas can I contribute?
   
   
   
   Yes, GlassFish is 100% open source and encourage committers.
   Some of the ideas are available
   here.
   Please feel free to suggest any contributions at
   dev@glassfish.dev.java.net.
6. What Ruby features are getting into Java language?
   
   
   
   If Java closures proposal is accepted
   then that will be a Ruby feature.
7. Does jMaki take care of browsing history ?
   
   
   
   jMaki does not support browser history yet but this feature will be made
   available as an extension in
   the near future.
8. Is jMaki extensible ?
   
   
   
   Yes, read how jMaki framework can be extended as explained
   
   here.
9. What is the performance impact of using jMaki ?
   
   
   
   jMaki.js is the initialization script (18kb) for jMaki that is
   loaded when the web application is loaded. This script provides
   multiple features, included but not limited to:
   • support for common event model between widgets from multiple
     toolkits (using
     
     publish/subscribe)
   • Dynamic Container at component level - allows to resize the
     component within <div> and iframe
   • doAjax call (allows to asynchronously invoke services from back end)
   • JSON.serialize (serializes JavaScript objects to JSON)
   • inspect (2-level deep inspection of object)
   • logger & debugging (log all publish/subscribe events and other
     messages to enable debugging)
   • namespace API  (allows to namespace all the widgets for clean
     separation)

   The jMaki wrapper is a minimal code that needs to be written anyway to
   invoke the code anyway so there is no additional overhead there.

10. Is Comet supported in GlassFish/jMaki?
    
    
    
    Yes, read about Comet support in GlassFish
    
    The Grizzly Comet and
    
    Writing a Comet application using GlassFish. Also try a simple sample
    that demonstrates how
    
    jMaki and Comet (read the
    
    explanation) work nicely with each other.

11. Can GlassFish deploy EJB 2.0 apps ?
    
    
    
    GlassFish is Java EE 5 compliant which maintains backwards compatibility
    with J2EE 1.4 and so EJB 2.0 applications can be deployed.

12. Do GlassFish support Active and Passive cluster ?
    
    
    
    In GlassFish the cluster instances talk to each other for health monitoring
    through GMS (of Shoal). The buddy
    instances talk to each other for replication of the session state. When a
    failure is detected the LoadBalancer can failover the request to any
    instance in the cluster. The session in question will be fetched from a
    replica to this instance in order to continue the conversational state of
    the session. In this sense, we have an active cluster.
    
    
    
    GlassFish does not have a concept of a standby or passive cluster which will
    take over when an active cluster fails altogether. That is usually
    considered a high cost approach for redundancy and not advisable. 
    
    
    
    Read more discussion
    
    here.

13. Can we add a Metro Web service wrapper be created around
    EJB 2.0 ?
    
    
    
    Nope, Metro Web service wrapper can be created around EJB 3.0 only.

14. How can an application deployed on WebLogic be migrated
    to GlassFish ?
    
    
    
    Migrate2GlassFish
    helps automate the migration of J2EE/Java EE applications to GlassFish.

15. Can Entity beans be configured only as read-only beans -
    caching server for these beans ?
    
    
    
    Yes, read about the
    
    characteristics, good practices, how to deploy and refresh read-only
    beans.

16. How can jMaki applications run behind the firewall ?
    
    
    
    Add the following Servlet parameters to web.xml:
    
    
    
    

    &lt;context-param&gt;<br>
    &nbsp; &lt;param-name&gt;proxyHost&lt;/param-name&gt;<br>
    &nbsp; &lt;param-value&gt;PROXY_HOST&lt;/param-value&gt;<br>
    	&lt;/context-param&gt;<br>
    	&lt;context-param&gt;<br>
    &nbsp; &lt;param-name&gt;proxyPort&lt;/param-name&gt;<br>
    &nbsp; &lt;param-value&gt;PROXY_PORT&lt;/param-value&gt;<br>
    	&lt;/context-param&gt;

    
    
    
    
    This is described in detail at
    https://ajax.dev.java.net/xmlhttpproxy.html.

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