Carla Mott's Blog

GlassFish future directions

A TENTATIVE GlassFish roadmap was announced yesterday at JavaOne. Here is a summary of what is planned so far and additional information will be provided soon. Please use the GlassFish dev@glassfish.dev.java.net mailing list to provide feedback.

GlassFish Update Release is the next releaese from the FCS branch and is primarily a bug fix release. This is an opportunity to provide additional bug fixes to the v1 release that were not included in the final release. It should be available in several months.

At the same time, GlassFish v2 is the next "dot" release and currently under development in the trunk of the workspace. There are promoted builds of this release available today however these builds primarily include bug fixes only. The TENATIVE feature list for v2 includes:

• Clustering support - see project shoal
• Load balancing support
• some scripting support - JSR 223
• Performance enhancements
• Tango integration
• Unified Test Framework

v3 release is further out but we are thinking about adding Web 2.0 support, some architecture changes and additional features that are requested by the community. This is very hand wavy at this point but as we discuss v2 we can better understand what features may move into v3 and what new features we would like to consider.

We have more ambitious goals for GlassFish and want to provide a Java EE 5 compatible container that has startup and footprint comparible to other available containers. This could mean significant changes to the code base and a new major release.

As you can see there is alot of work ahead and big plans for the future of GlassFish. More information will be available on the GlassFish site soon. We welcome any and all feedback.

Comments

• Before adding any of these "cool" features, Glassfish should dedicate a lot more resources to producing documentation. Just my 2 cents...

  Posted by: cowwoc on May 18, 2006 at 02:53 PM

• Hi cowwoc,

  What kind of documentation are you lookin for? There are many blogs, tech tips and articles. There is are guides for development and adminstration and a tutorial. What specifically would you like to see?

  Thanks, carla

  Posted by: carlavmott on May 25, 2006 at 09:58 PM

• Documentation needs:

  
  Thoroughly document the directory structure and meaning of each file and directory (or atleast the central one). While it is easy to comprehende alone, you never know when you've missed something unless there's a doc for it. For example, where does one put additional jdbc driver jars? now I know but I had to trial-and-error before I learned it...
  The documentation for all the "sun-*.xml" descriptors is basic at best, and sometimes even missing. Putting the docs in the schema and generating from there might be a good idea (some IDEs know to extract this as javadocs...).
  Samples: provide a rich-client sample app in addition to the ajax+web samples in the dist. Provide both a basic one and a comprehensive one.
  IDE integrations: how to integrate with IDEs other than netbeans (e.g. eclipse and idea, jdev, etc).
  Extensive web-start "behind-the-scenes" documentation (besides Tim Quin's helpful blog). How does it work, how can one extend it, how can one create a custom JNLP but still reuse some of the server's web-start features (when the generated jnlp is insufficient).
  Explore the common use-cases and document them as a use-case guide
  Best practices (how to best package an application, whether to seperate persistance jar from the session-beans jar, ejb3 persistence beans used as VOs and transferred to the client and how to cope with lazy associations when in the client, replacing jndi names of session beans, etc).
  if I'll think of more I'll post here...

  
  Non-the-less - the server itself (from a limited tinkering till now) seems really great and is much more organized than, for instance, the jboss server. It's structure and architecture seems well thought-of, so kudos for the technical job here!

  Cheers,
  Arik Kfir.

  Posted by: arikk on May 27, 2006 at 02:31 AM

• Hi Arik,
  Thanks for the specific feedback, these are great suggestions. I will communicate this with the team and see how soon we can get something out. It may be that in some cases the info exists but is not easily found. For example, blueprints has some best practices info already. Not sure if they address what you spoke of but I will pass this along. Also we do have samples and a samples project. Going forward there will be more work in that area. If you want samples and the app server etc you can download the Java EE 5 SDK today.,

  Please continue to add to the list if you think of more things.

  
  Carla

  Posted by: carlavmott on May 27, 2006 at 08:24 AM

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.