Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart's Blog

Open Source Archives

Productizing Open Source - The GlassFish Approach

In the last few weeks I've explained several times some of the details of how GlassFish is productized by Sun, so I decided to write up a description of the 3 main points: • Need for a Sustaining Branch, • Reconciling Sustaining and Main Branches, and • Where and When to Productize / Harden the Code Check it out and let me know if there are key questions still unanswered.

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.

Looking for a great WS & XML Evangelist...

Thanks to everybody that applied for the engineering job openings in our group. We filled a number of the openings but we still have some in Prague so please contact me if you are interested in that location. My last attempt to fly to Prague was derailed at the eleventh hour, but everybody says it is a great place and at least one of our engineers is relocating there.

We have one new opening, this time for an evangelist on Web Services and XML. The work would include evangelizing the Project GlassFish technologies, which include Fast Infoset, JAXB 2.0 and JAX-WS 2.0 among other Java EE 5 technologies and the recently announced effort on interoperability with .Net.

More details are in the job posting. The location is listed as either Santa Clara, CA, or Burlington, MA, but there may be some flexibility.

Drop me an email if you are interested. The technologies are great, we want a super evangelist that will spread the word.

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

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 :-)...

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