Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart's Blog

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.

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.

What are your favorite public REST endpoints?

There are a number of Consumer Web Services in the internet, the eBays, Yahoos, Googles, etc. A number of these use a REST architecture. The JAX-WS 2.0 specification supports REST endpoints, and, with the good integration with JAXB 2.0, we expect a very good developer experience. We would like to collect some public REST endpoints so we can test the implementation (in the JAX-WS project in the GlassFish Community) and possibly also write a few samples.

What are your favorite public REST endpoints?

Thanks, - eduard/o

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.

Glassfish to interoperate with .Net

The GlassFish Project is currently working on adding interoperability with the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF, nee Indigo). The first press report I see is from InternetNews.

This initiative will be developed at GlassFish and will be using the same CDDL license that is used by the rest of GlassFish and other projects like OpenSolaris. As with other previous projects, it may take some time for the project to show in the public CVS repositories, although the lag time has been getting shorter. When it goes out, the effort it will be fully aligned with the rest of the WS and XMLM projects that are part of the JWSDP subcommunity of GlassFish.

Openings in the WS and XML group available now

The Web Services and XML group at Sun has several new job openings. The openings are in the USA (West and East coast), India (Bangalore) and in the Czech Republic (Prague) and are available now. There are openings for engineering (all 3 locales), quality assurance (IN & CZ), program management (US) and engineering management (CZ).

Right now the only jobs posted at the external Web site are three US jobs (1, 2 and 3), but all the openings are ready.

This is the group where I work. The group has several responsibilities including the work in the JWSDP components that are part of GlassFish. I am obviously biased but this is a very good group and I think the work is going to be fun. We are looking for smart and energetic individuals that want to make a difference; it sounds trite but it is true :-).

Send me mail if you are interested. One caveat is that I'm going on vacation next Wednesday, but I'll leave an alternate contact in my vacation email.

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.

You can try FastInfoset with JAX-RPC

The recent JWSDP 1.6 includes an FCS version of JAX-RPC 1.1 that supports the recently finalized Fast Infoset standard. The implementation uses the code in the FI project. The integration of FI into JAX-RPC 1.1 is part of the TBD weekly drops. We are also beginning to work on the integration of FI into JAX-WS 2.0 but that is a separate story.

Our internal benchmarks show between 2x and 4x improvements when switching from textual XML to fast infoset encoding. The variation depends on the type and size of the content, and method of sending (for example, binary attachements are sent directly).

Our implementation determines whether to use Fast Infoset based on protocol negotiation between the client and the server. By default the client content negotiation is switched off, but it can be enabled through a global system property or through a property on the Stub or Call. Paul and Santiago wrote down how to do this in a short note.

This is just our first integration of FI into WS and there is still room for improment. Still, we find the performance gains quite interesting. Since the improvements will vary from case to case, it might be interesting if you could give us feedback, performance or otherwise, on your experience. You could do this in the Binary XML and WS forum.

Tags: GlassFish, FastInfoset, JWSDP

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.

The FI Project - An Open Source Implementation of a Binary XML Standard

Last June I talked about Fast Infoset (formally ITU-T Rec. X.891 | ISO/IEC 24824-1), being standardized at the ITU-T and ISO. In a nutshell, Fast Infoset (FI) is a binary encoding of the XML Infoset that has been designed to provide a good tradeoff between reducing encoding and decoding time and reducing the encoded size. The encoding is independent of the Schema of the document being encoded, although it is possible to use external dictionaries and binary encoding algorithms to improve its performance for specific applications. You can think of Fast Infoset as GZIP for XML: like GZIP, you only need to know that the file is encoded to decode it, but unlike GZIP, encode and decoding performance is as important as encoded size.

Interest in Binary XML is increasing. Our group at Sun has been investigating performance bottlenecks for Web Services for a while. We first reported on some of that work at a session in JavaOne 2003 and we later hosted a W3C Workshop on Binary Interchange of XML Infoset. These two events showed a lot of interest which was later confirmed by very positive feedback from a Technology Preview of the Fast WebServices technology. We have seen substantial increase in the interest in the last few months reflecting the desire to use XML and WS in more situations; here is one public indicator. We, and other companies, are working in the W3C XML Binary Characterization WG to determine if there is a single binary XML standard that will work for all use cases. This process will take some time, but in the meantime we believe there is a substantial number of customers that have needs today that will be satisfied with the Fast Infoset standard.

A standard is only as useful as its adoption; to that effect, Sun has created the FI project at Java.Net to develop and make available our implementation of Fast Infoset. The implementation is available under an Open Source license (ASL 2.0) and is intended to be a high quality implementation to be used in production artifacts, including producers, consumers, and intermediaries of Web Services, in XML readers and writers, and in other XML applications. The implementation should be directly usable by Java applications, but should also help implementors in other languages to understand the standard, and should encourage wide adoption of the standard.

The existing code contains partial implementations of the Fast Infoset specification for the SAX API and the StAX API. We will expand the implementation quickly but it is already functional and we have run a number of micro and macro benchmarks with very encouraging performance numbers. Your mileage can (will?) vary, but we are seing 3x to 4x time improvements in micro-benchmarks and 50% improvements in a WS-centered macro-benchmark we use internally when integrating FI into JAX-RPC. We will be contributing to the JAX-RPC project at Java.Net to support FI in that code base. That can then be used in different containers, including Sun's free J2EE AppServer (yes, this is a plug for our product :-}).

Finally, to encourage discussion on Fast Infoset, Fast Webservices, and any other topic related to binary XML, binary WS, et environs, we asked the Java.Net editors to create a new Binary XML and WS forum. We encourage your comments there.

JSR for JAX-WSA just filed

There is a new JSR-261 for JAX-WSA: Java API for XML-based Web Services Addressing. This JSR was submitted by Sun with the formal endorsement of Apache Software Foundation, BEA DevelopMentor, JBoss, Novell, Oracle, SAP, Sonic Software, Sun Microsystems Inc. and Tmax Soft, Inc.

The JCP EC will be voting on this proposal in the next couple of weeks. If the proposal is approved, we expect a few additional members to have an EG that represents the interests of platform vendors, tool vendors and other types of users of the technology.

Sun, as the submitter of the EG, will be responsible for delivering the Reference Implementation, which we would do at Java.Net layered on top of the new implementations of JAX-RPC 2.0 and JAXB 2.0, as part of the JWSDP community, and with similar terms and conditions.

JWSDP 1.5 is out!

Ramesh announced the release of the latest version (1.5) of theJava Web Services Developer Pack.

My favorite two additions are a brand-new implementation of StAX and a new, FCS, version of the XML Web Services Security. The StAX implementation builds on the low levels of Xerces and thus can nicely co-exist with the rest of JAXP and its performance seems very good in internal benchmarks; I'm sure the Neeraj and the team would be interested in how it works for you. The new version of XML WSS includes additional Ease of Developement features; the feedback there is to Vishal's team. JWSDP 1.5 also includes upgrades to all the other technologies, some guidelines on how to write Web Service clients in J2SE and an improved installer.

You can post feedback through the USERS mailing list of the different Java.Net communities. You can send StAX and general issues to that of jwsdp, while both JAXB and JAXB have their own mailing lists.

Ramesh and Anita told me that they will be giving a free webinar on JWSDP 1.5 at JavaOne Online on Dec 15th at 10am PT.

Using JAXP 1.3; even in older JVMs!

JAXP 1.3 is in Tiger. The latest release of the Java API for XML processing includes support for all the latest versions of your favorite standards (DOM level 3, SAX 2, XML 1.1), the old goodies (Namespaces, XSLT 1.0, XPath 1.0, XML Schema), and some new standards (XInclude). It includes some very useful new APIs including a validation API that can be used to preparse an schema for performance. The validation API can support multiple validators, so it can support, for example, Relax NG. JAXP 1.3 also includes a new API for XPath manipulation, and other goodies.

Jeff, Ramesh and Bhakti gave a good overview of JAXP 1.3 at JavaOne this year. A PDF of the presentation is available for free at JavaOne Online. JavaOne Online also has available the transcript and voice recording of many (all?) presentations, since I expected significant interest, I asked them to make this session free. You may want to check it out; it uses a flash client and it is quite cool.

The spec itself was written by Jeff, Norm and Kohsuke with help from all the JSR-206 crowd and it is available at the JCP site. Jeff insisted in writing it in XML and automatically generate PDF and HTML from it. Unfortunately there seems to be something somewhat broken with the download page for the official final spec, but the proposed final draft 2 is available and my recollection is that it was pretty much the same as the final. Use that while I track down the problem.

Now, how do get your hands on an implementation of JAXP 1.3? The easiest way is to just download Tiger, J2SE 1.5. But if you need to use an older JVM like 1.3 or 1.4, you will need an unbundled implementation. We just released one at Java.Net. It based on the same code base as the Tiger implementation, including the high-performance XSLTC compiler. As with previous versions of JAXP, we are cooperating with ASF and the code will eventually make it back to xerces and xalan, but you don't have to wait to use it!

Enjoy, and start collecting ideas for JAXP 1,4, which will be part of Mustang.

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.

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.

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...

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!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.