The first month of the The Aquarium has gone very well. We had seen an increase in news related to the Java WSDP, Java EE 5 and the GlassFish developer community and we wanted to have a good way to collect these news and then broadcast them to a wider audience. I wanted to expand on our previous use of RSS, but it seemed that a plain aggregation would just not be enough, so I talked with a few people and we started a group News Blog using Roller 2.0.

We try to cover all original source news directly related to GlassFish and the Java WSDP, plus other news that are relevant to people using these artifacts. The trends are good: volume is increasing, and we are seing many more postings originating outside of Sun.

Now that we have a full month of content, we are going to be to advertise The Aquarium more widely. We also need to provide better indexing and searching into the content since we are accumulating content very quickly. Other future directions include screencasts, more summaries from forums and mailing lists, more reports on frameworks and applications running on the artifacts, more user experiences. I think we will be in very good shape by JavaOne'06 (this year in May).

Some Statistics

• Blog Entries: 84
• Geographies: 12 - Canada, Czech Republic, France, India, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, South Korea, Spain, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, USA.
• Elvis Sightings: One, in San Jose
• Companies known to include GF technology: 3 - Sun, Oracle, T-Max
• Artifacts Available at GF sites (estimate): 8+ - Application Server, JWSDP, JAXP+StAX, FI, JAXB, JAX-RPC, JAX-WS, Java Persistence.

The current editors for The Aquarium are: Carla Mott, Rich Sharples and Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart. Check us out at The Aquarium, or send us mail with tips and feedback to theaquarium at sun dot com.