Carla Mott's Blog

May 2006 Archives

GlassFish BoF summary

The GlassFish BoF on Tuesday evening of JavaOne was well attended with lots of great questions. Jim, Amy and I gave a quick overview of GlassFish, where we are today, highlights on the community and roadmap with future directions. I have posted the slides here .

As I mentioned there were lots of questions during the 50 minute BoF and luckily there were many GlassFish developers, architects and spec leads available to answer all types of questions. I will summarize some of what was covered in case you didn't make it.

Question:Is it really production quality? Answer: yes. Remember GlassFish code was donated in by Sun (SJSAS 8.1) and Oracle (TopLink Essentials). Both products are used in production today. This question was also addresed on the quality alias for GlassFish with more details.

Question:Will clustering features will be added to GlassFish? Answer: Yes. See my previous blog for more information though details have not been worked out. Over the next couple of weeks there will be discussions on what features will be in GlassFish v2 and so the details will be flushed out then.

Question:Are there any books on Java EE 5? Answer: Still a bit early but I know of a few in the pipeline. However, there are many blogs, tech tips, articles which discuss the new features in Java EE 5. The server documentation is available online as well as the Java EE 5 tutorial.

Question:Why did the quality choose TestNG over JUnit for the unified test framwork? Answer: There was a discussion on the quality alias. More notes need to be published but that alias is the right place to get more info.

Question:Why use GlassFish or how do I talk to my management about switching? Answer: GlassFish is the first robust, commercial, compatible Java EE 5 implementation. It is free for development, deployment, and redistribution. You will find GlassFish support in both NetBeans and Eclipse. It has higher throughput, faster response time, and improved management features to streamline deployment, 30 percent faster startup time and web services performance increased by up to 5 times over SJSAS 8.x. There are several support options including $99 for Sun Developer Expert Assistance - See http://developers.sun.com/services/expertassistance/ Many more can be added to the list. We are creating a web page which summarizes the list more completely.

These are some of the questions that were asked that I remember. If I remember more I will update the blog.

GlassFish community awards

At the GlassFish and JUG reception Wed night of JavaOne included some time to recognize contributions from members of the GlassFish community. Several awards have 2 winners because we recognized both Sun employees and non-Sun employees. View GlassFish award

Most bugs filed:
Sanjeeb Sahoo filed 74 issues
Jean-Baptiste Bugeaud filed 40

Most posts to the forum:
Sanjeeb Sahoo had 160 posts
Cay Horstmann had 110 posts

Major Contributions:
Jean-Baptiste Bugeaud (individual) contributed the code for JDBCRealm which is available in GlassFish starting with v2_b01.
Gordon Yorke and Tom Ware (corporate) for their work on the TopLink code which is the Java Persistence API implementation in GlassFish.

Most frameworks and apps tested:
Masoud Kalali tested 7 apps and frameworks for GlassFish v1 release. The full list of applications and frameworks running on GlassFish is here.

Infrustructure support for GlassFish:
Kohuske Kawaguchi has several projects on java.net that support GlassFish but in particular Hudson, a continuous build system is used to determine status of the GlassFish builds. He also created the java.net maven repository and tools to facilitate building GlassFish jars so they can easily be imported into the repository. He also added several of the jars that are now available.

Congratulations to the winners. A big thank you to all who participated in Project GlassFish v1 release.

GlassFish: multiple releases available

GlassFish v1, (milestone 7) has shipped! It is the first Java EE 5 compatible application server availablle to date.

Work on GlassFish v2 has already begun and promoted builds are available. Note that the build numbers were reset to 1. Many exciting features will be added to v2. See my previous blog about tenative plans for v2 and let us know what you think should be added to the next release of GlassFish.

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.

GlassFish Milestone 7 is the final build

Milestone 7 is the final build for GlassFish v1. This is very exciting as it is the first major release of GlassFish. Contributions from the community include patches, documentation updates, ports, blogs and testing. There has been tremendous amount of support considering we announced GlassFish less than one year ago. Thanks to all who helped make this happen.

GlassFish code base is used to create the Sun Java System Application Server PE 9 which is part of the Java EE 5 SDK. SJSAS PE 9 is freely available, deployable, compatible, production quality application server.

GlassFish and SJSAS 9.0 PE final releases

Today Sun announced the FCS release of Sun Java System Application Server PE 9 included in the Java EE 5 SDK. It is the first Java EE 5 compatible application server available for download. Focused mainly on developer productivity; the full featured, high-performance, small footprint container is free for development, deployment and redistribution. The code for Application Server PE 9 is derived from the open source Project GlassFish.

GlassFish build 48 is the final build for the FCS release. I'm working on updating the download page to reflect the final release.

Get more information about the Application Server and the GlassFish community at The Aquarium

GlassFish and JUG reception - register

GlassFish and JUG joint reception at JavaOne is open to all. Please take some time to register for the event and you may win a prize.

Each day Vircon selects a winner and sends out a book from the following list: Beyond Java, Java Exception Handling, Testing and Debugging, The Java Programming Language 4th Edition, Net Beans IDE, Head First Java, Wicked cool Java, Effective enterprise Java, Head First Design Java, Java Enterprise in a nutshell, Java in a nutshell or Thinking in Java 4th Edition. Also Vircon will be giving away a PlayStation Portable at the reception. And of course, we'll have t-shirts.

Come hear about Java EE 5, GlassFish and the latest on AJAX frameworks. Mix and mingle with Java EE spec leads, Sun and Vircon architects and the GlassFish Implementation team while enjoying a beer and appetizers on us.

GlassFish.next promoted builds

GlassFish.next which cooresponds to SJSAS 9.1 is under development and promoted builds are now available. Many bug fixes have gone into this and new functionality such as a JDBCRealm.

We're finishing up testing on the FCS branch and should have a final release of GlassFish soon. B48 is the latest FCS candidate.

GlassFish build to download

GlassFish is nearing it's first FCS (final and stable) release. At the same time, development continues on the GlassFish.next release. Builds for both releases are available so here is some info to help you figure out which one should you download.

Currently promoted builds from the FCS branch are the only promoted builds avialble and those are announced as they happen. Since these builds are pretty stable and there are very few changes introduced from one build to another, there are no nightly builds from the FCS branch.

Work on the trunk(tip) is for the GlassFish.next release and nightly builds from the trunk are also published. These nightly builds are available, however the naming is a bit confusing. The build number has not been updated on the trunk since the FCS branch was created. To find the appropriate nightly build start with b43 and then look at the date. If today's date is May 4 2006 then the nightly build produced on that day is glassfish-installer-b43-nightly-04_may_2006.jar

Soon we will have a naming convention in place that cooresponds to the next releases of GlassFish. Hope this helps

Latest GlassFish docs

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