Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart's Blog

Community: Java Enterprise Archives

Reference Implementations and Production Quality Implementations

One of the reasons for the success of the JCP is that it requires a Specification, a Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) and a Reference Implementation (RI). The TCK is intended to cover the specification and the RI is required to pass the TCK; together, these deliver specifications that are implementable and testable. Together with the community participation in the Expert Group and in the different Review Processes, all this leads to good, useful, implementable specifications.

A popular misconception is that a Reference Implementation always is a "toy" implementation, unsuited for production use. This is not true. An implementation being an RI just means that it satisfies this specific role in the JCP process; there are all types of RIs. Some implementations are indeed just "proof of concept" but others are production-quality and are used in commercial products.

An example of this misconception applies to Project GlassFish. Every now and then I hear somebody saying that "... but it is just a Reference Implementation". The implementation created by this Community is the RI for Java EE 5 but that implementation is also distributed as the Sun Java System Application Server 9.0. Part of the confusion is because at some point in the past Sun had two AppServers; that changed years ago and it is no longer the case but misconceptions take a life of their own (as politicians, movie stars, and many others know...)

Hope this helps. I'll contact Onno and suggest he add some clarification in this topic to the JCP FAQ.

BTW, if you are interested in Project GlassFish and the Java EE 5, you may want to check a note I recently wrote for TheAquarium collecting 20 Things You Should Know about Project GlassFish.

First 5 months of TheAquarium - Reporting on GlassFish and more...

I've not been very active on my Java.Net blog because I have spend most of my blogging time coordinating and contributing to the The Aquarium. We started TheAquarium on November 30th and I provided a Report after 1 month; since JavaOne is around the corner, I thought I'd do an updated report now, at 5 months, rather than wait for the customary 6 months.

The Aquarium is a News Group blog; we started focused on all portions of the GlassFish Community (including JSF, JAX*, JWSDP, etc) but we also cover several other related communities like Open ESB, Portal, Derby, Web Server and AJAX and Scripting, as well as tools (mostly NetBeans but also some Eclipse) and Mustang. The Aquarium is a major contributor to the list of Frameworks and Applications that work with GlassFish.

In the first 5 months we have written over 570 entries. Counting the original sources (bloggers) is harder, but I did a quick pass and guesstimate it at over 260; some are very prolific, some not. We seem to have stabilized around 5-7 entries a weekday, we are mostly limited by the ability of the editors to keep up with the sources and we are planning to add a planet aggregator to address that. Most of the sources are from Sun but the ratio of non-Sun bloggers is increasing steadly.

We publish two localizations: Chinese - led by Qingqing and Spanish - myself - that provide an additional outreach into specific communities complementing the main blog, which is in english.

We generate a Weekly Roundup of the news and there is also a Search Facility.

Blog readership and impact is always hard to gauge accuratedly, but we are happy with visitors: we are always in the top 10 most popular blogs of Blogs.Sun.Com, often in the top 5 and we have been top 1 several times. Our repeat visitor ratio is excellent, over 30%, and annecdotal buzz is very positive ("Excellent Aquarium", "Great blog"). We believe that The Aquarium has been very succesful as a Knowledge Base and also has worked well increasing awaress of the projects it covers.

Looking to the future, we just added a new editor, Ron, that will focus on SOA, JBI and ESB, and we expect another editor. We also have a Japanese localization ready and we are considering one more. We are also planning some focused coverage of JavaOne.

Overall, our experience with The Aquarium has been very positive and very much welcome any suggestions you may have to improve it.

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.

The Aquarium - The First Month

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.

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.

Running GlassFish on Mac OS X

Yesterday I tried the latest Mac OS X build of GlassFish. I only tried a simple "hello world" application, and that worked fine but I had to hunt and peek a bit around to find how to do a few things, so read on for a somewhat detailed description of how to install and set-up GF and how to run that hello world WAR.

I've updated the community documentation at the Wiki to reflect these notes and will file an Issue item on a couple of problems that I believe are bugs. I will try installing some more interesting applications later in the week.

Continue Reading...

Ask-the-Expert on Project GlassFish

A quick heads-up that Jim, Carla and Amy are going to host an Ask the Experts session on Project GlassFish. Hopefully there will be follow-up sessions on specialized topics.

You should know about the J2EE SDK...

AppServer 8.0 PE uses technology from multiple sources. For example, the JAXB and JAX-RPC implementations are verbatim from projects at Java.Net; while the JAXP implementation and JSP, Servlet and JSTL implementations are based on the XML and Jakarta projects at Apache. Other pieces, like the JMS and EJB implementations are Sun internal. The result is a strong implementation of the latest J2EE standard, J2EE 1.4.

I think Sun has done a pretty good job with the AppServer 8.0 PE. There is still work to be done, but it is much better suited to the needs of developers than previous versions. And, from the feedback I have seen, many people agree: we have seen a large number of downloads and the download numbers are increasing.

I can't tell if AS 8.0 PE is the server-side container for you. Maybe you like Tomcat better, although 8.0 PE has a version of TC 5.0 in it. Maybe you like Jetty, or Resin, or maybe you like JBoss. Or WebLogic or WebSphere or something else. But I think you might want to check it out, read its FAQ and, if that sounds interesting, perhaps download it. And, if you like it, vote for it at this week's poll :-).

Disclaimer: As a Sun employee working in the Java Platform group, I have carried two hats for the last 8 years. Most of the time I carry my Community Advocate hat; sometimes my Sun Employee hat; most of the time both hats (and the reason why I work at Sun is because for the most part these two hats are well aligned). I am carrying both hats for this blog - perhaps with a bigger Sun hat than usual :-)

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