Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart's Blog

June 2005 Archives

My Favorite Heroes of JavaOne

My favorite heroes of each JavaOne are the Duarte folks. The typical cycle for J1 speakers starts early in the year and there are multiple deadlines through that cycle, but the one deadline that can't be missed is the presentation itself! That means that just before that presentation we all go through the Room 140 - the speaker ready room - to be sure that the presentation looks good, and, more often than what we want, to do the last minute tweaks.

Room 140 is Duarte's room, but their job starts earlier. They take our presentations and make our formatting and images look good and consistent. Then we arrive to Moscone and go to 140 and check how things look like... and what the lawyers did to our text. So we go and work with Duarte to somehow rewrite all those "Java(tm) technology..." back into sensibly sized bullets. And also to add the last minute announcements and must-do changes. Which somehow they do, most of the time without getting upset with us.

They are behind the scenes but they have saved me time and time again doing those last minute changes to my presentation. A cheer for them!

Note for J1'06: BOFs and After Dark do not mix...

Am I misremembering, or previous conferences didn't have BOFs overlapping with After Dark activities? In any case, attendence to our BOF was very sparse (although those that came were quite engaged) and attendance was equally weak for the other BOFs I checked. And I don't blame attendees to want to take a break in the evening of Day 3...

I would consider not scheduling any BOFs during After Dark activies for J1'06.

MTOM interop working...

I knew MTOM support was already implemented in recent JAXB 2.0 builds but I had missed that the full integration with JAX-WS 2.0 was also working. I just talked with Rajiv and he tells me that last night Simon and Rags got it working between the Indigo Beta RC and the JAX-WS 2.0 EA2 released last week. I hope I won't jinx by talking about it, but Simon and Rags will demo it during their session this afternoon.

The session is TS-9866, "Advanced Web Services Interoperability", 2:45-3:45 in the Yerba Buena Theater.

The WS Stack from Java.Net

The JWSDP community at Java.Net is building the production-quality WS and XML stack for Project GlassFish. This Java.Net community is also the main mechanism to increase the usefulness of this stack for the developer community at large.

Kohsuke, Kirill and I are hosting a BOF (9646) on the community tomorrow, Wednesday, at 7:30pm on Moscone Hall E 133. We only have 50 minutes, so I will be doing a very fast overview of the goals and the projects in the community, Kirill will talk about JAXB-workshop, and then Kohsuke will describe TXW.

We hope to do Q&A through the presentation and at the end. We would love to hear your feedback to these projects, and we would like to encourage you to come drop by before joining the After Dark activities.

To answer an common question - yes, the CDDL announcement from Monday applies to the Sun projects in this community.

Tags: JavaOne, GlassFish, CDDL, JWSDP

My TS spotlight for Tuesday - FI and iStack TS

Tuesday will be another day full of presentations at JavaOne'05, but I want to highlight two that are based on projects in our Java WS and XML Community. A full list of all the TS and BOFs related to our community is listed here

First TS-3477; at 1:30pm, in Moscone Center/Hall E 134, Kohsuke, Doug and Rajiv will talk about the new iStack implementation that supports JAX-WS 2.0 and JAXB 2.0. This is a very interesting implementation that aggresively uses annotations to deliver improved ease of development, ease of deployment, smaller footprint, and high performance.

Then, at 4pm, in the same Moscone Center/Hall E 134, Paul, Santiago and Don are presenting TS-7187 where they will give the latest update on Fast Infoset. Paul and Santiago will talk about the standard, which was finalized recently and the implementation. Don will talk about how the X3D. specification uses FI and will show a demo showing the performance gains this enables. Incidentally, X3D is what was used in the demo of the Ultra 20 at the general session on Monday morning.

iStack is implemented by the jax-rpc and jaxb projects, the core Fast Infoset implementation is in the FI project, while the integration with JAX-RPC 1.1 is at the jax-rpc project. All these projects are, or will be as soon as we come back to work after JavaOne, based on open source licenses, and are part of project GlassFish.

Tags: GlassFish, JavaOne , FastInfoset

JavaOne sessions: Projects from WS & XML Community

Neeraj and I put together a Wiki page with a List of TS and BOFs that are directly related to projects in the WS and XML community at Java.Net

We meant to push this out over the weekend but things have been piling up, in the typical JavaOne fashion. Monday is almost over but hopefully this will still be useful for Tue-Thu.

   - Enjoy!

Tags: JavaOne

JWSDP components, GlassFish and CDDL

We (Sun bloggers) thought there would be no news reports on Sun open sourcing the AppServer until the beginning of JavaOne tomorrow morning but it seems the news are out there (see [1] for example). I don't know if this was intentional or not - some of the initial pieces came from NZ, so maybe somebody didn't indicate what TZ the release date was? - but, in any case, we checked (blogging by employees does require some basic coordination to maintain trust across all parties) and we got the go-ahead to talk about it tonight. So...

I will let Jim, Carla, Amy and others talk about some of the other GlassFish details. Here I just want to clarify how this will affect the JWSDP projects.

The decision to Open Source the code base for Sun's App Server Platform Edition includes all the projects in the JWSDP community that go into that artifact. That includes

• JAXP and SJSXP (StAX)
• JAX-RPC 1.1, JAX-WS 2.0 and JAX-WSA
• JAXB 1.0 and JAXB 2.0
• SAAJ, JAXR
• WS Security

Eventually we want all these projects with a live code repository at Java.Net under the CDDL license and with an active developer (including external commiters) and user community. Some of the above projects are already there, all will get there as soon as practical.

This is very exciting news to many of us, who have been involved in this discussion thread for ... hum... do I really want to dwell on that?... let's say quite a while... So, yes, this code base is now open source. Now, let's use OSS to build a stronger community so we can make these implementations the best implementations available. And so they, together with other implementations, will make the underlying specifications top quality.

It's going to be interesting to see how the community reacts to this announcement tomorrow at JavaOne. One thing that sometimes people forget is that Sun's Application Server (formally known as Sun Java System Application Server, but that is always a mouthfull) is the core of the J2EE SDK, which is downloaded in very large numbers (see You should know about the J2EE SDK), and this move will just make that artifact more useful to the developer community, and even more popular.

Tags: GlassFish, CDDL, JWSDP

You can try FastInfoset with JAX-RPC

The recent JWSDP 1.6 includes an FCS version of JAX-RPC 1.1 that supports the recently finalized Fast Infoset standard. The implementation uses the code in the FI project. The integration of FI into JAX-RPC 1.1 is part of the TBD weekly drops. We are also beginning to work on the integration of FI into JAX-WS 2.0 but that is a separate story.

Our internal benchmarks show between 2x and 4x improvements when switching from textual XML to fast infoset encoding. The variation depends on the type and size of the content, and method of sending (for example, binary attachements are sent directly).

Our implementation determines whether to use Fast Infoset based on protocol negotiation between the client and the server. By default the client content negotiation is switched off, but it can be enabled through a global system property or through a property on the Stub or Call. Paul and Santiago wrote down how to do this in a short note.

This is just our first integration of FI into WS and there is still room for improment. Still, we find the performance gains quite interesting. Since the improvements will vary from case to case, it might be interesting if you could give us feedback, performance or otherwise, on your experience. You could do this in the Binary XML and WS forum.

Tags: GlassFish, FastInfoset, JWSDP

JWSDP 1.6 is now available

The release 1.6 of the Java Web Services Developer Pack 1.6 has just been released and it is now available for download.

The release includes:

• Fast Infoset 1.0 FCS acceleration technology built on ASN.1 standards
• Service Registry early access release for SOA web services
• XML Web Services Security 2.0 early access
• JAXP 1.3.1 FCS release
• XML Digital Signatures 1.0 FCS release
• Sun Java Streaming XML Parser 1.0 EA release, a high performance implementation of JSR 173
• Bug fixes, refreshed core components (JAX-RPC, JAXB, JAXR, and more)

The large majority of these components are currently under community development as part of the JWSDP community , and the missing ones will be there in the near future. All these components, except for the Service Registry, are also part of project GlassFish.

Tags: glassfish, fastinfoset, jwsdp.

Developers page for JWSDP

I've added brief blurbs for six additional developers to the developers page for the JWSDP community. The developers added are:

• Alan Hudson
• Lexi Valikov
• Ben Gordon
• Don Brutzman
• John Swift
• Kirill Grouchnikov

My intention is to have descriptions for all developers in this page. This will take some time, but I wanted to get started before JavaOne. Incidentally, although not all JWSDP components are in part of project GlassFish, all these developers work in at least one glassfish related project, and the 6 new additions are all not Sun employees, so, in a sense, they should be added to Carla's list.

Tags: glassfish, jwsdp.

Sun's Service Registry announced

Wednesday, Sun announced its Service Registry. This product is based on the freebXML Registry project at SourceForge that is implementing the complete OASIS ebXML Registry specifications as defined by the OASIS ebXML Registry Technical Committee.

This project is part of the JWSDP community but the project has been ongoing for quite some time and its code repository is located at SourceForge. The code is available today under an open source license. The registry will be included in the next, almost there, version of JWSDP: 1.6.

JAXP Builds now available

A follow-up to my previous post on JAXP 1.4: the JAXP team has just posted early access builds of JAXP 1.3 and of JAXP 1.4. Specific JAXP 1.3 builds will eventually show up in GlassFish builds, while JAXP 1.4 will be in Mustang builds, but having separate builds will allow more flexible uses.

One last WS/XML summer intern slot

I know it is very late in the summer intern season, but we just got a new summer intern slot to work in the area of Web Services and RSS/Atom. If you are interested and have expertise in these areas, please contact me as soon as possible.

JAXP 1.4 at Java.Net

JAXP 1.4 is the next release for JAXP, intended for Mustang. JAXP 1.4 is a maintenance release: it provides a few small spec improvements and fixes but mostly it provides some utility classes to make it easier to use StAX and JAXP 1.3 together.

The CVS repository for the JAXP 1.4 Reference Implementation just went live at Java.Net in the JWSDP community. One of the nice things of this JAXP 1.4 implementation is that it provides a ready-to-use package that combines the StAX implementation with SAX and DOM implementations and all the benefits of JAXP 1.3(like validation).

I looked and the JAXP 1.3 sources seem to be gone for now, but I believe the plan is to put them back in the near future. Weekly builds for JAXP 1.3 and JAXP 1.4 should also be available soon. I talked with the project leads and I'll post again when I find out more details. Note that, since the JAXP 1.4 repository is what is used directly by the development team, it will always be up to date; that is one of the benefits of the general move to a more transparent, community-centered development in the Mustang, JWSDP and GlassFish communities.

JAXP 1.4 is in Mustang but not in GlassFish. GlassFish will have JAXP 1.3 and the same underlying StAX implementation as in JAXP 1.4, but not the API maintenance changes themselves, which won't be final until Mustang goes final.

JWSDP now also in GlassFish!

The JWSDP community groups a number of inter-related Java projects in the Web Services and XML area at Java.Net. These projects include XML Binary Encoding (FI), XML Processing (JAXP and SJSXP), XML Data Binding (the JAXB family of projects including the latest JAXB-workshop), WS Communication (JAX-RPC et al.) and samples.

These projects are all available individually at Java.Net but, in addition, they are also grouped into stable releases in the Java WS Developer Packs available from Sun, and in many other Sun and non-Sun artifacts. The latest of these is the GlassFish project that was announced earlier today.

The GlassFish project is the community place for the development of the J2EE 5 SDK; since most of the JWSDP projects are the reference implementations of specifications destined for J2EE 5, all these projects will be available separatedly but also integrated into the builds of the new AppServer in a timely manner. This should be beneficial to everybody; the community will be able to start using all the new features together, the implementors will get additional feedback, and so will the Expert Groups writing the specifications.

GlassFish is yet another step in a long road to become more attuned and responsive to the needs of the developer community. We hope it will be useful to you, and await your feedback.

And also look forward to more JWSDP components to start showing up in Mustang as part of J2SE 6.0!

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