Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart's Blog

Community: Java Web Services and XML Archives

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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!

Revamped JWSDP Developer home page

I have revamped the JWSDP developer's home page at Java.Net. There has been a lot of new activity in the JWSDP community including new EAs for JAX-RPC 2.0 and JAXB 2.0; the SJSXP and JAXP 1.3 weekly builds, and I piling that on the old page seemed to make things more messy, so I used that excuse for the cleanup.

The new page tries to provide a quick entry into News, Downloads, Specs, Blogs, Mailing Lists and Forums. The home page will also highlight developers and projects as those are the core of the JWSDP community.

As with all sites, this is work in progress; post your feedback as comments on this blog, or mail them directly to me.

JAXB 2.0 and JAX-RPC 2.0 EA binaries...

Doug reports that the binaries for the EA for JAX-RPC 2.0 are out. I'm sure Kohsuke or Sekhar will have a corresponding blog on JAXB 2.0. The downloads are off the correspoding Java.Net projects: jax-rpc and jaxb.

Please give us feedback!.

JAXP 1.3 sources now at Java.Net!

JAXP is the core API for XML processing in the Java platform. The latest version is JAXP 1.3 which is in bundled in Tiger and is also available unbundled for older JVMs. Those implementations were frozen sometime before the final round of integrations into Tiger and were overdue for an update with the latest changes Xerces and Xalan. The JAXP team just finished that integration; the sources are available at Java.Net right now and will be donated to Apache very soon (tomorrow?).

The integration milestone seems a good excuse to do a quick review of the JAXP 1.3 features. Neeraj has written a nice article, but below is a very brief summary for those in a hurry...

The biggest addition in JAXP 1.3 is the new Schema validation framework. In the older APIs, validation was a feature of the XML parser used: you requested a validating or non-validating parser (be it SAX or DOM) and there you went. The new Validation API decouples the validation of an instance document from the parsing of the document. This new approach has a number of advantages including reuse of compiled Schemas, support for other schema languages (Relax NG fans will like that), the ability to validate without parsing, like after a transformation or in memory, and others. I always found the old mechanism a bit awkward, so I was very happy to see the new API.

Another substantial addition is a new API for XPath. The API currently supports XPath 1.0 but it was designed with the intention of extending it to XPath 2.0 in a future version of JAXP. The API allows reevaluating expressions in different contexts, support for namespaces, support for variables in XPath expressions, and others.

JAXP 1.3 also includes some additional XML Schema Datatypes, support for XInclude, a new reset() method to reuse a parser instance, and a new property to alleviate denial of service attacks

Have fun! If you want to use the features right away, download Tiger or the unbundled implementation at Java.Net. The unbundled version is based on the same sources as the version in Tiger so it is very stable; I expect builds based on the latest updates from Xerces and Xalan to follow pretty soon.

Indigo and Binary XML

Yesterday I attended Indigo Day at VSLive! in San Francisco. I had not yet been in Moscone West and I enjoyed it. The site is smaller than the older site where JavaOne is held, but it is above ground, with sunlight and with better cell phone reception. It was a useful day, although the crowds are substantially smaller, and older!, than what I've got used at JavaOne, and the trade show was thin.

The keynote presentation was by Eric Rudder , and then later Don Box gave the first presentation in the Indigo track. They both did a good job and together with the other presenters provided a good overview of Indigo. Indigo is MS's next generation WS platform and is intended to substantially improve the ease for writing WS endpoints that can be given different attributes, like reliability, security and transaction-support.

Indigo makes heave use of attributes, and the presenters showed it with examples in both Visual Basic and in C#. The basic principle is what Don describes as A, B, C: an endpoint is an Address, plus Binding, plus a Contract. The address is the URL for the service and the contract describes the types and operations exposed by the service. The binding is a combination of the protocol, the encoding and properties of the interaction (security, reliability, flow). I can't give a fair description of the material in this short blog, and I'll follow-up at some point in the future, maybe when Microsoft publishes the presentations, which they said they would do. I found a pointer to an older document on Indigo but it is quite older and what they presented yesterday looks better.

In general, Microsoft is putting together a good WS foundation; a substantial improvement over their older APIs, which were described as "legacy" APIs. Since I want the Java platform to do at least as well, I'm quite happy that we have been working hard on the next generations of JAXB and JAX-RPC and I really want to encourage you to start looking at that to be sure they are as capable as possible.

There is one area of Indigo that I want to mention here. As I said, the binding of an enpoint includes the protocol (things like HTTP, TCP, NamedPipe), the Security, Reliability and Flow attributes (based, for example, on WS-* protocols), and an encoder for the content. The whole thing is customizable, which is very nice, and there are a few predefined bindings for the most common cases. For example, there is one binding that uses WS-I basic profile over HTTP, and another doing the same over HTTPS. Encoders have names like WSHttpBinding, or NetHttpBinding (don't hold me to the exact names, though!).

The presentations described 4 WS* bindings and 4 Net* bindings. The WS bindings use textual XML as the encoder. Guess what do the Net bindings use? Right! a binary XML encoder!

The binary XML encoding used in Indigo was described by Eric as the binary encoding of the infoset. Later a member of the audience asked if the encoding was described "somewhere" and Don replied "yes", but that was it, so we don't know much. From the one-line description I would expect the encoding to be similar to the open standard developed by ISO/ITU-T Fast Infoset that is being implemented in the open source FI at Java.Net.

Indigo's binary XML encoding was mentioned in a number of places as a way to speed up the communication, including specific cases like when talking to the SQL Server (textual XML also being available there). The story is similar to the one we have been advocating for a while, so it is nice to have MS also validating our approach. It would be nicer, though, if MS recognized the value of having an open standard. If not participating in the development of the Fast Infoset standard, at least participating in the XML Binary Characterization WG at W3C. That WG has wide membership and MS absence is very noticeable.

If Indigo's binary XML encoding is proprietary, its appeal will be more limited. Fortunately, Indigo's binding machinery is supposed to permit the use of other encoders, so, if there is no special support for the proprietary encoding, one should be able to plug in an encoder for the open Fast Infoset standard and use it and get all the benefits of binary XML with interoperability. It will be interesting to give it a try once Indigo goes out later this year in their Technology Preview.

Preview of next Draft of JAX-RPC/JAXB 2.0

Arun has posted a Technology Preview for the EA of JAX-RPC 2.0 and JAXB 2.0.

The TP is available for download from the JWSDP community and includes a rewrite of the WS-I Sample Supply Chain Management Application using the latest (Early Access) version of the JAXB 2.0 and JAX-RPC 2.0 specs. The TP also includes the older version of the same application, so you can start by doing a simple comparison between the two samples. Documentation is very limited: there will be more documentation in later artifacts, including a new EA2 of JAX-RPC 2.0 and later additional revs of JAXB 2.0 and JAX-RPC 2.0, but the TP will help start the conversation.

Feedback should be provided through the JAXB 2.0 and JAX-RPC 2.0 Forum that was created specially for this at Java.Net.

JWSDP 1.5 Chat at Java.Net

JWSDP 1.5 went live last November. JWSDP is a bundle that includes many of the implementations we are developing in the jwsdp project at Java.Net. Version 1.5 is the latest release and it includes implementations of XML Web Services Security and the StAX.

The lead engineer for the pack and the lead engineers for the XWS and StAX implementations will be giving a chat on these topic tomorrow, Jan 25th, 2005, at 9 AM PST/17:00 UTC. Chats are good opportunities to get your answers real time directly from the developers.

Summer Intern Positions available

Our group has two summer intern positions available, one to work with the new Fast Infoset project, the other to work with the new implementations of JAX-RPC and JAXB 2.0.

I am looking for some strong candidates. The projects should be a lot of fun and I have had some very good experiences in the past; my only concern is that I blinked and didn't post this until now. Check out some of the details and let me know if you think you are a good match.

WS and XML Sessions at JavaOne '05?

Pierre is asking for ideas on what developers want to see in the Web Tier sessions at JavaOne this year. I'll add my plea to his, but on the Web Services, XML, et environs area.

What Technical Sessions, BOFs or other activites would you want to see at JavaOne?

What are the JRL and the JDL licenses?

Some of you observant types may have noticed that some recent JSRs, like JAX-WSA list JRL and JDL in section 2.18, "Terms and Conditions". The JRL we knew, it is the Java Research License introduced at J1 '03. The JDL is a new license, the Java Distribution License. IANAL and all disclaimers apply, but, here is my operational micro-summary of these two.

JRL and JDL are much simpler that some of the licenses used by Sun in the past, like SCSL: JRL is under 2 pages, JDL under 4. Neither carries some of the most complicated clauses of SCSL but both remain committed to the Java compatibility requirement and are not, to my knowledge, OSI-approved. In a nutshell, the JRL is for research and internal use; the JDL is for commercial deployment.

The JDL licenses just started being available. The first actual deployments are JAX-RPC and JAXB, but Common Annotations for the Java Platform and JAX-WSA indicate they will also use JDL, and other specification efforts are likely to use JDL too. I expect that, as was the case with JRL, some of the details of the JDL will change as the requirements of other specs are folded into it and it is quite likely that we will end with several versions of JDL due to conflicting needs.

JDL grants the right to do changes and then distribute the result, provided the changes are compatible. Compatibility is defined through the specification and the Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK). Sun is making the JAXB and JAX-RPC TCKs available for free to be used to help test the compatibility of these RIs (and derivative artifacts) but that is not necessarily the case for all APIs placed under the JDL.

Hope this clarifies things a bit. I've been involved in the process for the JAX-RPC and JAXB versions of JDL and I believe they address those requirements that were not fullfilled by the JRL, but if I'm wrong, I'm sure somebody will tell me :-)...

JAX-RPC and JAXB now under the new JDL!

The JAXB and JAX-RPC projects at Java.Net develop the Reference Implementations for these specifications. The source code for these projects has, until now, only been available under JRL, the Java Research License. JRL is intended for research and internal prototyping and does not allow for modifications intended for deployments. This is a problem for those groups that want to do their own support, want to apply fixes without waiting for the changes at Java.Net, want to take the implementation into different directions, or just want a security blanket. It tooks us longer than I wished but we finally fixed this deficiency through an additional, brand-new, license, JDL, the Java Distribution License, and by providing new access to the associated TCKs.

The JDL allows modifications intended for deployment and commercial use. JDL is a much simpler license than some of its predecesors but it preserves the key JCP compatibility requirement centered on Specifications and Technology Compatibility Kits (TCKs). The version of the JDL that we are using in JAXB and in JAX-RPC includes the right to access the TCKs for these technologies. These TCKs are now also at Java.Net and can be used, free of cost, on the Reference Implementations and on artifacts derived from them to help test their compatibility.

The JAXB and JAX-RPC production-quality implementations are already used in products like the J2EE SDK and the different editions of Sun's Application Server, in the JWSDP, and in stable and weekly individual builds. The new JDL license and the availability of the TCKs will expand the applicability of these Java.Net implementations to those groups that feel they need to do their own - compatible! - modifications.

RSS and us

One of the challenges of a community lead is keeping the community informed of what's happening. Pretty soon you realize that the only way to do this is to somehow channel the efforts of the leads of all the projects that are in the community. And the more automated, the better. Sometime over the summer Java.Net provided all the pieces needed to do this. We now have:

• RSS feeds automatically generated from the announcement tool for each project at Java.Net
• Multiple buckets in a community home page
• Buckets that can be filled automatically from a set of RSS feeds
• RSS feeds generated from designated buckets

We are now using these pieces in the Java WS & XML Community. All the announcement news from projects in the community are fed into the Community Announcements bucket that is in the right pane. This bucket will automatically show the most recent 10 announcements.

Each announcement feed is of the form http://myproject.dev.java.net/servlets/ProjectNewsRSS. Our bucket is currently showing news from the community itself (creation of new projects, etc) and news from the JWSDP projects but if you have a project in this community and you are actively using the announcement tool, let me know and I'll add your project to the bucket.

Any bucket in a community home page can be designated as the source for an RSS feed. If you look at the left page for our community you will see that we have two RSS feeds. One for the Community Announcements bucket, and another for the Community News bucket.

The RSS feeds themselves can be read by any RSS reader. I'll confess I didn't know much about the practical details of the technology until recently, so when I went looking for information I decided to capture what I found and the result is the RSS corner. In a typical Wiki fashion, the pages are work in progress, and you are encouraged to contribute to them.

While looking for content for the RSS corner I discovered a number of RSS-related projects at Java.Net. One of them is already in our community: Rome is a very good java library that can consume and produce RSS feeds in all known formats; there are several other projects currently scattered around Java.Net. RSS is here to stay, so I hope that we will be able to generate synergy across all these projects and reuse pieces from the different projects.

I'm a born-again RSS guy... If you know of interesting and/or unusual applications of RSS, could you post pointers as comments to this thread?

Want to help lead the WS & XML Community at Java.Net?

We are going through a rotation on the management team of this community.

The Java Web Services and XML community was created at JavaOne '03 and Kohsuke Kawaguchi and myself were the original community managers. Later Michael Champion and Will Iverson joined the team. Mike and Will are overloaded with other commitments and are stepping down and I am also planning to step down so I can focus on other projects (and maybe even start blogging more consistently!) but Alejandro Abdelnur and Ramesh Mandava will be joining the team.

Thanks to Mike and Will, and welcome to Alejandro and Ramesh! And continued thanks to Kohsuke!

Three is a good sized team but a larger team is even better as then it is very easy to do a rotation, like they do in the java-enterprise community, and then the load is very manageable. In addition, Alejandro, Ramesh and Kohsuke are all Sun employees and it would be nice to have non-Sun members in the team.

So...

Please send me mail at pelegri@dev.java.net if you are interested in this opportunity.

Thanks,

- eduard/o

JWSDP 1.4 is out!

• FCS implementation of JAX-RPC 1.1 with substantial performance improvements and implementing WS-I BP 1.1 and WS-I's Attachment Profile 1.0.
• FCS implementation of JAXB with substantial performance improvements.
• FCS JAXP 1.2, with new renamed packages, and with XSLTC as default transformation engine.
• EA support for OASIS's WS Security.
• EA support of JSR 105, implementing XML Digital Signature.
• Tested with several containers: Sun's App Server 8.0 PE (this the same as the free J2EE 1.4 SDK), Sun's Web Server 6.1, and Tomcat 5.0

A longer list is at Sun's web site, but below are some comments on this one.

In Sun's parlance, FCS stands for "first customer shipment", and means the component is production ready. In the case of the JWSDP, the license for FCS components allows deployment, but they are not supported - the supported versions will show up when bundled in later releases of Sun's products. EA stands for "early access" and indicates the component is useful for development but there may still be changes in the component, including the API!, before it becomes FCS quality.

JWSDP 1.4 has a number of substantial performance improvements. On the JAXB front, the biggest improvements were on marshalling and unmarshalling: when measured using an internal microbenchmarks we saw about 2x improvement; much of this thanks to direct feedback from the weekly builds at the JAXB project at java.net. I don't have specifics handy on the JAX-RPC improvements but they are key contributors to the recently published results on a macrobenchmark analysis comparing J2EE and .NET on WS and XML. XSLTC is, of course, the XSLT compiler that started as Sun experimental work, was then donated to Apache and is now in full product-ready mode (it is bundled in Tiger!); we see between 2.5x to 11x improvements in performance when compared with Xalan classic- although this depends on whether you apply the stylesheet only once, or several times. The usual disclaimer applies: although the numbers we quote are our best understanding of the real situation, your performance may vary... (there are lies, dammed lies, and benchmarks :-)).

The WS-I's Attachment Profile 1.0 is the MIME-based spec from WS-I that describes how to send attachments in WS messages. Attachments are critical to practical applications of WS and I believe that JWSDP is the first FCS-quality implementation of this standard.

The other major change on JAXP, besides the change of the default transformer (Xalan classic is still there, just not the default), is that the packages got renamed. This is so that you don't have to do classpath magic (which too often leads you into trouble) if you want to use at the same time the new JAXP classes and some other version of Xerces or Xalan.

I could also talk more about the JDBC RowSet Implementations 1.0 JWSDP 1.4 Co-Bundle, which provides a set of tools, documentation, samples and tutorial for developers who want to use JDBC RowSets with Web Services, but I'll talk more about that in another blog.

Finally, I just noticed that Marc also posted a blog on the JWSDP; Marc is a key participant at WS-I, among many other things, so he is your man in that area of the JWSDP!

JAXB 2.0 and JAX-RPC 2.0 EA specs are out

Check the specs out. As an EA, there are some relatively big holes in the specs; for example, the JAXB 2.0 spec is only hinting at the addition of updateable partial binding, which I think is a very big improvement. There are a number of other key improvements, including:

• Integration of the two specifications: you now will be able to use the full JAXB machinery to do data-binding on JAX-RPC invocations
• Completion of much of the customization features in JAXB that were hinted in JAXB 1.0.
• Updateable partial binding, where a portion of an XML document can be bound to Java objects, which can then be updated and then converted back to a document.
• Support for asynchronous messaging in JAX-RPC.
• Support for other transports to HTTP in JAX-RPC.

There are other features; attend the JavaOne sessions on these topics to get more details, and I'l invite Marc, Roberto, Sekhar and Joe to present at some technical forum in the near future.

Technical Forum on Web and XML -- Call for topics and speakers

The topics for the forum would cover XML Applications, Web Applications and Web Services - again, we fine-tune as we go.

I already have a number of ideas and victims... err, potential volunteers. Please contribute ideas in the talkback of this blog.

Simple, Fast, no-Loss binary XML - Fast Infoset

There have been a number of attempts to address this problem by using some sort of binary encoding of XML. But the benefits of the approaches have not been researched carefully, and the lack of a standard has indered their adoption. I've been involved in a group that investigated this problem some time ago; the explicit goal was to match RMI-performance using WS interfaces and we discovered that if we exploited the type (schema) information in the WSDL we got very close to that goal. We coined the approach Fast Web Services and the approach is being standarized in ISO/ITU-T.

Fast Web Services relies on Schema information, but in some applications the Schema is not available (or even when we have a Schema information, whenever type Any appears), so some complementary solution is needed. Also Fast Web Services does not preserve the XML infoset - think of "sending the content, not the form" - while in many applications that is key. Both requirements are addressed by a technology we call Fast Infoset. The solution has good performance characteristics and is not hard to implement, and Fast Infoset is also being standarized at ISO/ITU-T.

One way to think of Fast Infoset is as a GZIPed XML. It has the same property that you only need to know it is encoded to recover the original. The main difference is that Fast Infoset is customized for XML and leads to better encoding and decoding times. Check out the article by Paul, Alessandro and Santiago to get all the details.

I believe that both Fast Infoset and Fast WebServices are useful; we will find out how much when the standards are finalized later this year and we start seing implementations. There is also a W3C Working Group in XML Binary Characterization that will consider the role of this and other technologies.

What is in JWSDP 1.4...

Highlights include:

• Support for WS-I's Basic Profile 1.1 with Attachments Profile 1.0
• Support for OASIS's Web Services Security
• Support for Sun's J2EE SDK, Sun's App Server and Web Server, and Apache's Tomcat
• Updated JAXB and JAX-RPC, with bug fixes and performance improvements

The implementations of JAXB and JAX-RPC come straight from the jaxb and jax-rpc projects at Java.Net (the home for the developer community for the JWSDP is at Java.Net); the rest of the pieces come from elsewhere, including Sun-internal projects and Apache projects, everything integrated into the JWSDP download.

Stay tuned to this channel for an announcement of the actual release...

Community Spring Cleaning

We have been doing some Spring cleaning and I want to give you a report on where we are, tell you about some future directions, and ask for feedback.

Home Page: The three panels in the Community Home Page now have different types of content: general news on the right panel, community news on the center, and community resource links on the left pane. We are trying to update the right pane several times a week with news related to this community collected from different RSS feeds.  The center pane is updated less frequently, with news from within our own community.  The left page is mostly static and contains links to different resources, including blogs, Wiki projects and people.

Types of Projects:  Projects at Java.Net can be Hosted or Linked.  Hosted projects maintain most of their content using the Java.Net machinery; linked projects exist elsewhere but they are listed in our directories.  Further, projects may be listed in an incubator if they are not yet ready to be fully advertised to the community.  Finally, we also track products of interest to the community.  I've contacted all the projects in the last few weeks, classifying them and, in some cases, deleting projects.  As with any cleanup effort, keeping it up to date is a never ending effort, but we are reasonably up-to-date. Right now we have about 28 projects in the main directory and about 18 in the incubator, with about 13 additional linked or other projects.  We get a few additional project requests each week; we are listing the new projects in the left pane.

Project Directories: There are multiple 'project directories' at Java.Net, some maintained by the SourceCast machinery, some are updated at Java.Net.  We are now trying to keep them all synchronized.  The directories we highlight in the left pane are Wiki pages that list all the projects and will eventually track their status.  We track separatedly the hosted projects (be them in the incubator or in the main directory) from linked and other projects and products.

Downloads: We are running weekly stats on access to our projects (thanks to Kohsuke and Ryan for this!) and we now have a link of popular downloads on the left pane.

Future Directions: There is a fair amount of effort in just keeping the existing infrastructure working; but, beyond that, there are a few ideas that we want to explore:

• A Technical Forum in this space: I have talked with the Java.Net administrators about moderating a technical forum where invited speakers would kick-off a discussion on a technical topic.  I host similar forums at Sun and I have a fairly good set of contacts to get the forum started.
• Improve Project, Product and Learning Content of Wiki: The wiki can contain much more information on these areas.  Just as an example, the learning Wiki page only lists Sang Shin's online course.
• Community Forums: We are currently not using any of the forums for this community.  We could start using them as a way to build community.
  

Getting to know each other

Part of being a community is knowing each other. In a physical community there are plenty of smalltalk opportunities that help create that awareness. In an online community like Java.Net we know each other through postings, blogs, news, and other artifacts we create. Some online communities support the notion of a journal or profiles; the closest mechanism we have in Java.Net is the People Wiki.

I would like to encourage the members of the WS and XML community to add pages for themselves in the People Wiki. Follow the link, and add yourself; I am there already.

It is specially important to know the leaders of projects in the community, so they are are specially encouraged to do this. Leaders should also add themselves to our own contact directory and they should create entries for their projects in the Wiki. Follow the same conventions of previous projects; you may want to look at the source of other pages to see how things are done.

Thanks!

Total Cost of Development and Developer Communities

The term total cost of ownership is frequently used to capture costs, sometimes forgotten, involved in owning a system. I've found useful to use the term total cost of development in a similar manner, capturing some of the less common contributors. Some of these costs are:

• Training
• Examples
• Support
• Risk of choosing the right solution

Training, examples and support should, ideally, be targetted to a the specific needs and background of the developer. Many people remember these contributors, but the last contributor is easy to overlook: when a developer chooses an approach to solve a problem (architecture, tools, platform, whatever) she is taking the risk that the approach may not be a good match to the problem. The mismatched approach may increase the cost of implementing the solution, or may even require a restart of the project.

There are other contributors to the TCD (tell me in the talk back), but what I find interesting is that all these costs are very well addressed by developer communities. The example that I often use is Struts . I don't want to minimize the technical benefits of Struts, but I believe that the main reason why Struts is so succesful is the very strong developer community built around the code which help reduce the tocal cost of development by addressing the contributors I mention above.

There are a number of developer communities, from our own Java.Net communities (I belong to the WS & XML and the jwsdp communities) to those provided by many vendors, includinng Microsoft.

Buiding a community is hard and takes time to build, but when they do a good job, they are extremely valuable. I think we are still, collectively, learning how to make these communities best serve their members.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.