Carla Mott's Blog

June 2005 Archives

GlassFish buzz means lots of people attend our BOF.

It 's been a couple of years since I've felt this kind of excitement at JavaOne. Wow what a great response to the announcement the Sun is open sourcing it's application server. Jim Driscoll, Amy Roh and I presented at the GlassFish BOF Monday evening to a standing room only crowd. Here are some highlights of that presentation.

GlassFish is Sun's application server under the CDDL license (Jim blogged about the licensethis morning).

- Not only open source but open process which means we are committed to working with the community to build a better application server.

- GlassFish is the next generation application server implementing the Java EE 5 specifications (all the specs). We took our production quality Sun Java Application Server PE version 8.1 codebase and started implementing the Java EE 5 features.

- Important goal is to track the platform specifications closely and MUST support Java EE compatibility. This is not a change.

- Download weekly builds or build the server yourself, try out the new features and send us feedback

- After just a few weeks, we already have contributions in the way of bugs and patches as well as an external commitor. So we're off to a great start!

We had lots of questions and Jim did a great job answering them or bringing up people who had more details. Some are addressed above, some in the FAQs and some deserve alot more discussion and are great for dev@glassfish.dev.java.net.

I did have a chance to talk to people one on one after the BOF and my favorite comment was "Thank you, thank you for open sourcing your app server".

Actually, thank you....

GlassFish external commitor

GlassFish has it's first external commitor, Jacob Hookom! Wait, how is that possible? It's only been a couple of weeks. Well, although GlassFish has been available on java.net for only a few weeks, Jacob has worked with the JSF and webtier teams for over a year where he as contributed ideas and code to both projects.

Jacob originally got involved with the JSF-RI when he wrote a JSF specific EL implementation. While working and contributing to the JSF-RI, he was able to offer other ideas which lead him to join the JSF 1.2 EG. Once things were fleshed out for the alignment of JSP 2.1 and JSF 1.2; he was included on web tier discussions where he introduced the concept of deferred variable resolution for JSTL and JSF integration. He also turned the JSF EL implementation into a reference implementation for the EL-API that's able to optimally handle the unique requirements of a JSF application's lifecycle.

Here's a quote from him: "The employees from Sun are always accessible and extremely receptive to new ideas; not only within the Java.net projects, but also as specification leaders in the JCP."

In addition, Jacob has his own project on java.net called Facelets which is a sub-project of the JSF-RI.

We are very excited to have Jacob on the team and we would love to have others participate in GlassFish too. There are several ways to participate and we encourage you to do so. Join in on the technical discussions on the dev@glassfish.dev.java.net alias and GlassFish forum, submit a bug, request a feature or provide a patch for a new feature or bug fix.

Announcing GlassFish

The GlassFish Project is a gathering place for developers who wish to participate in the community development of the latest version of the Java™ 2, Enterprise Edition (J2EE™) SDK. Developers can participate in the development process where community members can review source code, submit improvements, and join in technical discussions. GlassFish is a renewed partnership between Sun and the larger enterprise Java community.

Community development means that you work under the Java Research License (JRL) with the important understanding of ensuring compatibility of J2EE. It is the response to our developers who want access to the source code, the ability to contribute to the development of GlassFish, the server which is first with specifications, and enable them to understand Sun's J2EE development process while maintaining compatibility of J2EE. We only ask that you accept the JRL before checking out the project details.

I'm happy to announce that GlassFish is available for all developers to checkout, learn from and contribute to. I've worked on Sun's J2EE SDK for the past 6 years in some form or another. The people I've worked with on GlassFish are very smart, responsive and nice to work with. A multitude of us have given various talks at JavaOne and other conferences. Now you have the ability to work with us more closely than ever before. And we have the ability to get to work more closely with the numerous J2EE developers, many of whom are working on great implementations/additions to the technologies. It's a great way for all of us to build even better technologies.

At this time you have access to all the J2EE 5.0 based server code. Currently the webtier module is online with web pages and mailing lists to help understand that module and provide a mechanism to learn about what is available. We are working on creating the pages for the other modules. The webtier module includes code for a new HTTP connector, Grizzly, written entirely in Java and uses Java's NIO technology. For an overview on how it works see the webtier page of GlassFish.

You can also download the weekly promoted builds, install the server and checkout Grizzly and other new features that way.

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