Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart's Blog

J2EE 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.

JavaOne Recommendations for GlassFish Fans...

In my spare time I've started playing with Flash-based screencasts. My last attempt is a fly-by through all the JavaOne activities I know related to Project GlassFish. Just point your browser to this page.

Earlier in the week I also put together a couple of presentations using the same technology: Overview of Java EE 5 and a Teaser on the GlassFish Implementation. I'm still learning the medium and the technology and any feedback is appreciated.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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 :-)

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.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.