Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart's Blog

February 2006 Archives

Java EE 5 and GlassFish are Community Efforts

The beta for the Java EE 5 SDK is now available here and a set of tools that works with it is available here (the follow-up to J2EE 1.4 is Java EE 5, and that for J2SE 5.0 is Java SE 6 - the "2" is dropped and the "Java" is spelled out - it all makes sense but it can be confusing).

Today's releases are a pretty big deal and there are already several blogs, discussions, technical papers, and other news available; we will be tracking these through the next few days at The Aquarium.

The main focus of Java EE 5 is an effort to improve the ease of development, which is critical for the future success of the platform. Java EE 5 takes the new annotations feature of Tiger and the experience from around the Java Community at large (specially around the Java Persistence APIs), and folds all this into the new version of the server-side Java platform. The resulting platform is arguably the biggest release on the Java space this year; see Graham's Rave for a strong argument for this.

These two releases are very much community efforts. The tools are from the NetBeans community and I'll let people like Roman talk about them. The Platform is a joint effort from many groups including the Expert Groups from the JCP, the wider communities from Open Source projects like Apache and JBoss, and from Vendors like BEA, IBM, Oracle and many many others. The specific bits in the SDK are from GlassFish and I want to add two words about that.

For me, GlassFish is a bit of going back to 1996. I believe that one of the reasons why Java was very succesful at the beginning is because the original team was very well connected to their customers and responded very quickly to their needs. Some things have changed: the community is now bigger and includes non-Sun folks, we are now using an Open Source license, and we are now very widely distributed and we no longer use USENET news, (see my blog on Time Zones and Blogs) but the basic goal and method is the same as it was in 1996.

We have made big improvements at GlassFish since it was announced at JavaOne'05; just two examples are the emphasis on supporting popular frameworks and applications and open discussions on Rearchitecting the WS stack, but we know we still have work to do. Please help us to be truly attuned to the community!

Have fun with the releases.

Time Zones Don't Matter in the BlogSphere

The World is smaller and it only takes a few minutes to get an email message across almost any two points. Geographic distance does not matter, but in one of my earliest blogs I argued that Time Zones Still Matter in the Internet. But that statement was based on email interactions and for the last few months I've had quite a bit of experience in the use of blogs over distant Time Zones. Based on this new experience, I now believe that Time Zones Don't matter in the BlogSphere.

The contributors to the GlassFish Community are from many locations across the globe. Over the last few months these engineers have started blogging with increased frequency, and since late November, several of us have been using these blogs as sources to create a news blog (The Aquarium). Most of the blogs are very informative and, somewhat to my surprise, the geographic origin of the blog - and its Time Zone of origin - is totally irrelevant to its relevance and impact.

I think that what happens is that the communication style encouraged by blogs encourages a careful writeup that is self-contained, which is exactly what is recommended for communication across distant Time Zones. Also, the comments of a thread create a stream of communication that is directly tied to that content, and in most cases, it is quite acceptable to the author of a comment if the response happens many hours after the posting. All of this means that the author of a blog can be many TZs apart from the reader, with no substantial impact on the quality of their interaction. As a typical example, Sahoo is located in Bangalore, and I am located in SantaClara, California but, as an editor and a reader at TheAquarium, he is just one of the good contributors at TA.

There are many types of blogs, and I don't want to make a universal statement, but our technical blogs have proven to be quite immune to the Time-Zone problems that are very evident in email. In the new world of global communities, blogs are proving to be a very useful tool.

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