Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart's Blog

December 2005 Archives

Calling for GlassFish Screencasts

I find screencasts a very compelling and cheap technique to describe features and functionality. If you have never seen one, check out one of these two:

• NetBeans flash demo directory - A bunch of demos for NB 5.0 and NB 4.1, including at least one using the Java Persistence machinery in GlassFish.
• ZFS demo - Extremely compelling ZFS demo.

There are at least two good products: Camtasia Studio and Captivate. These are Windows products, but using VNC you can use them to capture presentations in other platforms. Creating a screencast is really easy. Pretty much you just need some good content, then put together a script - target 5, max 10 minutes - and then run the script. The major time expense is in the audio portion: we engineers tend to insert too many hums and ohms in our conversations.

I want to create a repository for good ScreenCasts showing off GlassFish. If you send me submissions, that we can use, I'll capture them into the repository and we will share with all the community.

I think this will be very useful for everybody in the community, so I hope everybody will be interested in contributing. To sweeten the deal, I'll throw in a ipod shuffle that somebody gave me "for a good cause". I will collect all the submissions by, say end of business (pacific time) January 15th, 2006, and I will ask for feedback on which is the most deserving one. Final decision will be mine and will be irrevocable, and if there any legal or logistic problems (like I can't mail to your country) that will take precedence. Only original screencasts count for the iPod deal, but do provide pointers to any relevant screencasts, even it is not yours.

Please add the URLs to your screencasts related to GlassFish as comments to this blog. Please add your email contact and check for earlier postings to avoid duplications.

Java EE 5 and GlassFish pages at Java.Sun.Com

Java EE 5 is getting closer... as you remember, in June of this year we went through a name change for the platforms including emphasizing "Java", dropping the "2", and moving from things like "5.0" to "5". I think that, overall, the changes are for the better, but they will certainly confuse people for a bit. It was extra confusing that there was not much content under the new name at Java.Sun.Com; a quick search would most likely get you on the J2EE 1.4 pages, and that was about it.

Things are beginning to improve. Java.Sun.Com just added some pages on Java EE 5. The content is a bit limited but at least there is a list of all the technologies. I'm sure that more content will be delivered leading up to JavaOne 06 (this year in May, from the 16th to the 19th!).

The other pages that were added are pages for the GlassFish Community which is developing the reference implementation for Java EE 5. We know from experience that having early access to the implementations is key to get high quality feedback on the specs, so, go grab a download a build and a spec and kick the tires.

Java EE 5 specifications in PFD

The Java EE 5 platform is described through a platform specification, a test suite (CTS), and a reference implementation. The reference implementation uses the code base developed by the GlassFish Community. The platform specification refers to a Java SE platform spec (J2SE 5.0, aka. Tiger), a collection of additional specs, and additional constraints. All these specifications are defined through the JCP and are now in the Proposed Final Draft stage. This means that the corresponding Expert Groups believe the specifications are essentially all done and the implementations and test suites are being written against these specs.

In a day or two there should be a page for Java EE 5 at http://java.sun.com/javaee/5/javatech.html. In the meantime, here is a list of the specs in PFD (the full list is at JCP.org):

• JSR 244 - Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5 (Java EE 5) Specification - spec.
• JSR 222 - Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) 2.0 - spec.
• JSR 224 - Java API for XML-Based Web Services (JAX-WS) 2.0 - spec.
• JSR 245 - JavaServer Pages 2.1 - spec.
• JSR 250 - Common Annotations for the Java Platform - spec.
• JSR 252 - JavaServer Faces 1.2 - spec.

There are a number of other specifications in Java EE 5, and the java.sun.com page lists them all. Of those, the most significant ones new specs that are not yet in PFD are Java Persistence and EJB 3.0, but they are very close. The latest released specs are the Public Drafts. Of the maintenance releases, probably the most significant ones are those for JSR 181: Web Service Metadata for the Java Platform and JSR 173: Streaming API for XML.

The implementation at Java.Net is tracking the specifications quite closely. There will a beta early next year, but if you want to kick the tires before then, please refer to the downloads page.

The Aquarium: News from the GlassFish Community

Several of us have started a new group blog (using roller 2 at BSC) to highlight interesting news from around the GlassFish community. We are all Sun employees but we will highlight all sorts of news related to the community; things like events, new features, milestones, community developers, success stories, partners, etc. Most of us have additional individual blogs and we will continue to use them, but we will use the new blog for the highlights.

Check us out at The Aquarium.

You can reach us with news submissions at theaquarium-comments at sun dot com.

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