Planète NetBeans

Bistro!: Visites Alpes JUG et GenevaJUG (22/23 juin 2010) - Java EE 6 et GlassFish

2010-06-14T21:25:39+00:00

Direction les montagnes (et pas n'importe lesquelles) la semaine prochaine pour parler de Java EE 6 et de GlassFish à Grenoble le 22 juin (à l'Alpes JUG) et à Genève le 23 (au GenevaJUG). Au delà de mes sujets de présentation favoris, ce sera l'occasion de voir ou revoir des têtes connues et j'espère d'une bonne discussion (avant et pendant la 3ème mi-temps). Aller, pour lancer le débat :

• Spring est-il soluble dans Java EE 6?
• Tomcat est-il soluble dans GlassFish?
• OSGi va-t-il nous sauver comme Maven l'a fait en son temps?
• GlassFish est-il soluble dans WebLogic?

Réponses la semaine prochaine! Venez nombreux!

Bistro!: GlassFish dans PHP Solutions! :)

2010-05-06T10:35:42+00:00

Jérôme Lafosse (décidément il n'y a que des Jérôme dans ce métier! :) , auteur et formateur Java, a contribué au dernier numéro de PHP Solutions avec un article intitulé "Coupler la puissance de Java EE et PHP grâce à GlassFish".

Jérôme y discute en détails et code à l'appui de l'utilisation de Quercus (de Caucho) comme interpréteur PHP fonctionnant dans GlassFish v3. Une bonne combinaison qui ne souffrirait pas d'y rajouter NetBeans PHP qui est probablement le bundle NetBeans qui a le plus fort taux de croissance en ce moment.

Jérôme travaille sur un livre Java EE / GlassFish et sur de nombreux exemples de code. Quand on aime on ne compte pas!

Bistro!: RDV à Lausanne ce jeudi 6 mai 2010 - GlassFish et Java EE 6

2010-05-05T21:36:30+00:00

Karim et le reste de l'équipe du LausanneJUG m'ont convié à venir aujourd'hui jeudi 6 mai à présenter sur Java EE 6 et sur GlassFish v3.

Comme d'habitude j'espère pouvoir faire un maximum de présentations et que les questions seront nombreuses. RDV à 18h30 dans les locaux d'Octo.

La copie d'écran à droite est tirée de la page d'usage de GlassFish : http://maps.glassfish.org qui propose désormais un petit champ de recherche pour localiser votre ville.

Bistro!: Le futur de GlassFish en Français

2010-04-06T04:35:13+00:00

Bistro!: GlassFish à la manoeuvre chez PSA Peugeot Citroen

2010-02-26T06:01:00+00:00

Le choix de GlassFish par PSA Peugeot Citroën n'est pas nouveau mais je suis tout de même très content de voir aujourd'hui la société communiquer sur son utilisation du produit en production. Les échanges avec Sun sont nombreux depuis près d'un an et concernent pour l'instant GlassFish v2.x.

Bistro!: Session de rattrapage GlassFish et Java

2010-02-16T12:30:08+00:00

Pour ceux qui n'ont pas pu assister au RoadShow Java et GlassFish, voici la session de rappel sous la forme d'un séminaire en ligne ce jeudi :

Webinar Roadshow Européen Java
jeudi 18 février 2010, de 10h00 à 13h00
Accès à l'événement:
https://sunmeetings.webex.com/sunmeetings/onstage/g.php?d=711578867&t=a (mot de passe: "JavaRoadshow")

Au programme, quatre sessions de 45 minutes :
• "Java Keynote" par Dalibor Topic
• "Java EE 6 & GlassFish"
• "JavaSE Embedded"
• "Tuning GC"

Bistro!: Java EE 6 et GlassFish v3 ce mardi à Rouen

2010-01-15T04:32:11+00:00

Et hop, un JUG de plus pour Java EE 6 et GlassFish v3.
RDV cette fois-ci au NormandyJUG ce mardi 19 janvier 2010 à 19h00 pour une soirée avec Antonio et ma pomme à l'UFR Sciences et Techniques du Madrillet.
Détails sur le site du JUG.

Bistro!: Enregistrement du séminaire en ligne GlassFish v3 (novembre 2009)

2009-12-17T19:02:31+00:00

En attendant que les présentations de la conférence virtuelle Java EE 6 et GlassFish v3 soient disponibles (encore quelques jours), voici l'adresse pour voir ou revoir la présentation GlassFish v3 qui date de début novembre.

J'ai parcouru rapidement la présentation (en francais) et hormis la plance intitulée "D'ici Noël" (Devoxx et lancement de JavaEE 6 et GlassFish v3 ont tous été des succès), tout reste d'actualité.

Polyglot NetBeans: NetBeans IDE 6.8 Now Available for Download!

2009-12-14T14:40:23+00:00

"NetBeans IDE continues to be the tool of choice for top development languages; this release includes new features and improved support for PHP 5.3 and the Symfony framework, the latest JavaFX SDK 1.2.1, C/C++, Ruby, Maven and more. NetBeans IDE 6.8 also offers best-in-class support for the entire Java EE 6 specification and the GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 platform.

There are different ways how to get NetBeans. Sun Microsystems no longer offers free shipping of the NetBeans DVD Starter Kit, but they provide several ways for the community to still receive the tool: NetBeans Multilingual (ML) DVD Starter Kit Program.

If you want to download NetBeans for the first time and you need help with installation, follow please this page: NetBeans IDE 6.8 Installation Instructions.

As usually you can watch the video which introduce you NetBeans as a tool and also shows you some of the core new features:"

Blanka

Bistro!: GlassFish v3 est disponible! Une nouvelle ère commence.

2009-12-10T13:57:00+00:00

GlassFish v3 est désormais disponible en version finale et du coup Java EE 6 est lui aussi désormais final (depuis les votes récents, il manquait l'implémentation de référence et le TCK, c'est maintenant chose faite!).

Bien entendu il y a le support complet de Java EE 6 (ejb 3.1, jax-rs 1.1, jsf 2.0, cdi 1.0, etc...) et son profil web (40MB tout mouillé) qui apporte une flexibilité à tous les serveurs d'applications qui en ont besoin, mais il y a beaucoup de choses dans GlassFish v3 qui vont bien au delà de la spécification et du rôle d'implémentation de référence. Il y a les fonctionnalités pour le développeur (temps de démarrage hyper-rapide) et préservation de session sur redéploiement (lui aussi très rapide), son coeur HK2/Grizzly et ses fonctionnalités, la modularité et le support de OSGi (Apache Felix par défaut), le système de packaging IPS (à la apt-get) et son update center, le monitoring basé sur Btrace, ou encore son support dès maintenant dans les trois outils de développement qui comptent: NetBeans, Eclipse et IntelliJ.

Cette sortie du produit c'est selon moi le début d'une nouvelle ère à plusieurs égards. Bien entendu il y a cette nouvelle architecture modulaire qui donne à GlassFish un pérennité technologique que d'autres produits concurrents nous envie, mais c'est aussi un aboutissement d'une histoire mouvementé des serveurs d'applications chez Sun. Je suis rentré il y a 10 ans chez Sun avec pour objectif de "vendre" du NetDynamics (on ne parlait pas de J2EEà l'époque), un produit leader sur son marché et racheté par Sun. Quelques mois plus tard AOL rachète Netscape et Sun hérite du serveur d'application du même nom (lui aussi avec beaucoup de parts de marché) et qui sera finalement choisit au détriment de NetD. S'en suivent les années iPlanet, mauvais souvenirs d'un mauvais produit et beaucoup de projets avec BEA WebLogic...

Avec Sun Application Server 7, c'est un vrai reboot technologique qui sera complété par l'approche Open Source de GlassFish en 2005. La route fût longue (détails ici), beaucoup avaient enterré Sun (difficile de leur en vouloir) sur ses chance de survivre dans ce marché. Le renaissance se sera faite au prix d'un effort important en trois étapes: GlassFish v1 en 2006 (conformité à Java EE 5 et Open Source), GlassFish v2 (qualité des produits commerciaux au prix de l'open source), GlassFish v3 (innovation et business model en place). Le parallèle entre GlassFish et J2EE/JavaEE est d'ailleurs frappant. Les critiques étaient sévères (et méritées) dans les années 2000-2006 avant que Java EE 5 et GlassFish ne viennent changer radicalement les avis. Bien entendu la question de l'avenir sous un bannière potentielle Oracle se pose maintenant. Si vous ne l'avez pas déjà fait, je vous invite à lire le passage qui concerne GlassFish dans cette FAQ d'Oracle. Coté Java EE non plus je pense qu'il n'y a aucun souci à se faire.

Vous devriez voir dans les prochaines 24 heures tout le florilèges des annonces de presse, des articles, de posts sur twitter, des blogs (entre autre par Sun que vous pouvez suivre avec les balises glassfishv3 et javaee6), et autres commentaires. Pour vous faire votre propre idée, téléchargez donc GlassFish v3 maintenant! Enfin, je vous invite à ne pas oubliez la conférence virtuelle Java EE 6 / GlassFish v3.

Bistro!: JUG Toulouse ce mardi 15 décembre (et conférence virtuelle GlassFish v3)

2009-12-04T21:39:55+00:00

Ce mardi 15 décembre j'interviens au JUG Toulouse (un des plus beaux site web de JUG!) sur GlassFish v3. Voici l'annonce. Je compte passer que peu de temps du Java EE 6, non pas par manque d'intérêt ou overdose mais plus parce que Antonio est bien plus doué que moi pour traiter ce sujet en si peu de temps. Il sera donc plus question de GlassFish v3 qui sera sorti d'ici là (je croise les doigts!).

Pour tous ceux qui ne seront pas à Toulouse ce soir là, l'équipe GlassFish organise une conférence virtuelle à l'occasion de la sortie de GlassFish v3 et de Java EE 6. Spec leads, project leads, et autres ingénieurs seront tous là dans votre fureteur/navigateur. Pour s'inscrire. Les présentations seront ensuite disponibles en rediffusion.

Enfin, 2010 s'annonce pleine de visites de JUG et je dois dire que j'aime assez ces formats.

Bistro!: Java EE 6 approuvé !

2009-12-02T11:49:58+00:00

Ca y est, les votes sur Java EE 6 et les 5 autres spécifications encore non-validées (CDI, Servlet 3.0, JPA 2.0, Connectors 1.6, et EJB 3.1) sont terminés.

Le résultat est sans appel : c'est OUI (12 OUI, 2 abstentions, 1 NON - détails des votes: Java EE 6 | Servlet 3.0, EJB 3.1, JPA 2.0, CDI, Connectors 1.6).

Je vous invite à lire les billets de Roberto (Sun, spec lead Java EE 6) et de Gavin King (JBoss, spec lead de CDI). MAJ: les commentaires sur le blog de Gavin sont particulièrement intéressants sur la partie @Inject.

Pour que la spécification soit déclarée finale, il faut désormais attendre la disponibilité de GlassFish v3 (l'implémentation de référence) et du TCK. Encore quelques jours de patiente ...

Bistro!: Atmosphere jeudi, Devoxx lundi

2009-11-11T10:24:55+00:00

Pas le temps de respirer, demain Jeudi Jean-François Arcand sera là au ParisJUG pour vous donner un cours de bon français et pour vous parler d'Atmosphere, le framework multi-serveur pour faire du Comet (AjaxPush). Il y sera également question de comparaison avec Servlet 3.0 (ne pas oublier de s'inscrire, il doit rester des places).

Lundi, direction Anvers pour la conférence Devoxx. J'y présente avec notre Antonio Goncalves national (enfin c'est surtout lui qui fait le gros du boulot!) une session de trois heures sur Java EE 6 (dont les JSR sont approuvées les unes après les autres ces jours-ci). Entre consolidation des slides, mise au point des démos, et ajouts de dernière minute, on n'est pas tout à fait près...

Avec servlet 3, managed beans, bean validation, etc... cette session ira clairement au delà du contenu du bouquin d'Antonio (pourtant déjà très riche). Reste la question du JSR 299 qui mérite une session à lui tout seul (difficile de ne faire qu'une intro, la technologie a un ticket d'entrée non négligeable). En tout cas je trouve la progression dans la douzaine de démos plutôt sympa (une idée d'Antonio).

Pour ce qui est du contenu GlassFish (keynote, sessions, etc...): les détails sont ici.

Bistro!: La présentation du séminaire GlassFish

2009-11-09T14:02:00+00:00

Bistro!: Webinar GlassFish - aujourd'hui à 16h

2009-11-03T07:26:21+00:00

La présentation en ligne GlassFish est toujours prévue pour aujourd'hui (mardi 3 novembre) à 16h00 (heure de Paris, amis francophones du monde entier vous êtes les bienvenus!). Il n'est pas trop tard pour s'inscrire.

Jérôme Dochez (l'architecte de GlassFish) et Didier Burkhalter (la cheville ouvrière de nombreux projets GlassFish en entreprise) seront là pour m'aider à répondre au question pendant et après la présentation qui sera relativement courte (environ 30 minutes). A tout à l'heure.

Bistro!: GlassFish v2.1.1 est là

2009-10-29T07:39:57+00:00

Je ne sais pas si c'est pour fêter la sortie de GlassFish v2.1.1, mais Oracle vient de publier des nouvelles largement rassurantes sur GlassFish dans une nouvelle FAQ sur l'avenir de plusieurs produits Sun dans l'eco-système Oracle une fois l'acquisition finalisée. Il y est entre autre question de continuer un support actif à la communauté et aux clients GlassFish ainsi que d'alignements technologiques entre GlassFish Enterprise et Weblogic. Pour qui connaît les deux offres, je pense que cela apparaîtra assez naturel.

On notera qu'aujourd'hui déjà GlassFish utilise EclipseLink (l'implémentation de référence de JPA) alors que WebLogic 10g et 11g utilisent de multiples technologies de GlassFish comme en témoigne ces pages de modifications apportées par Oracle.

Quoi qu'il en soit, comme je le disais en début de billet, c'est la version 2.1.1 qui est rendue aujourd'hui disponible en même temps que Sun GlassFish Communication Server 2.0 (Sailfin 2.0), l'offre de serveur d'application Telco (SIP, Diameter, etc...) développée avec Ericsson. En attendant la version 3 en décembre, voici donc une version pour tous les clients actuels de GlassFish qui attendent avant tout des évolutions mineures (pour eux, plus de 200 bugs corrigés ce n'est pas mineur) pour leurs systèmes en production plus que des nouveautés comme v3 en apportera. Rarement l'équipe GlassFish aura été aussi sollicitée.

GlassFish 2.1.1 est une mise à jour de la version la plus largement déployée de GlassFish en production (niveau d'API Java EE 5). On y trouve de nouvelles versions de composants importants (Java MQ 4.4 / Jersey 1.0.3 / JSF 1.2_13 / Grizzly 1.0.30 / Metro 1.1.6), le support de AIX 6 et de mod_jk ainsi qu'une nouvelle option de partage de charge (par connexion) dans l'ORB. Enfin, le méchanisme de gestion de groupe Shoal propose des améliorations des node agents pour une meilleure détection (plus rapide, plus fiable) des noeuds d'un cluster. Bien entendu cette version continue de proposer une extreme simplicité pour la mise en place d'un cluster et les outils de gestion production GlassFish Enterprise Manager.

Téléchargement de GlassFish 2.1.1 ici: https://glassfish.dev.java.net/downloads/v2.1.1-final.html et n'oubliez pas le séminaire en ligne GlassFish de la semaine prochaine.

Bistro!: Séminaire en ligne GlassFish la semaine prochaine

2009-10-28T08:47:46+00:00

Avec l'activité autour de GlassFish (sortie imminente de v2.1.1, v3 dans quelques semaines avec Java EE 6) et le succès du livre blanc, il nous a semblé opportun d'organiser un séminaire en ligne pour faire le point sur l'avancement du projet et pour répondre à vos questions. Ce sera donc le

Mardi le 3 novembre 2009 (dans une semaine) à 16h00

Le format est classique: 45 minutes de présentation et le reste de questions/réponses. N'oubliez pas de vous inscrire pour obtenir les détails (URL et mot de passe).

Bistro!: "Le futur de Java" ce jeudi à l'OpenWorldForum

2009-09-28T07:02:24+00:00

Ce jeudi, vous êtes conviés à venir à l'Open World Forum qui se tient à Paris (Eurosites George V dans le 8ème) et en particulier à la series de courtes sessions autour de Java.

Avec l'imminence du rachat par Oracle de Sun, un point sur Java semblait intéressant et utile. Au programme, le chemin parcouru par Java SE depuis sa mise en Open Source et les avancées prochaines de JDK7, une table ronde sur les langages dynamiques sur la JVM (Groovy, Scala, Fan, et Clojure, ou Jython, JRuby et PHP?), et enfin un point sur Java EE 6 et son implémentation de référence GlassFish v3. Notre Guillaume Laforge sera de la partie pour la table ronde.

Ce sera bref (1h30 au total), mais une occasion concrète de faire le point sur les travaux en cours et sur ce que le futur proche nous réserve.

• Programme: http://openworldforum.org/program/floss-java.
• Enregistrement, c'est ici: http://openworldforum.org/Register.

Bistro!: Nice fait sa Java sur le serveur ce vendredi 2 octobre

2009-09-17T03:15:04+00:00

Le RivieraJUG, Polytech'Nice et Telecom Valley organisent une journée autour de Java EE. Il y aura deux intervenants de JBoss/RedHat : Peter Muir pour parler de Seam et JCDI (ex-WebBeans) et Tom Baeyens pour parler de jBPM. Notre Antonio Goncalves national clôturera la journée par une session sur Java EE 6. Quant à moi ce sera une présentation sur l'état d'avancement de GlassFish v3, en route pour Java EE 6. Je pense reprendre certaines démonstrations faites lors de la conférence JavaZone autour d'OSGi et du système de packaging. Des retours d'expérience et des pauses pour faire de networking sont également prévus.

L'événement est gratuit et se déroule à Sophia Antipolis sur le site de Polytech. L'agenda quasi-final (de 13:30 à 21:15!) et tous les autres détails se trouvent ici sur le site du RivieraJUG (accès direct à l'inscription).

Polyglot NetBeans: Let's continue...

2009-09-03T09:02:48+00:00

"Today we will speak about next NetBeans 6.8 Milestone 1 features, that can be interesting for you.

First of all there are a big changes for those, who create one of the Java EE projects (Web, EJB, AppClient or EAR project). Milestone 1 enables basic support for development of applications for Java Enterpise Edition 6.

If you start to create Web Application you will meet with lot of changes. In new project wizard in the section 'Server and Settings' you can newly choose Java EE 6 Web and as a built-in server GlassFish v3 which support Java EE 6.

In next step 'Framework' you can choose improved JavaServer Faces. The big changes in the JSF 2.0 area include the usage of Facelets as the default page language, and usage of annotations instead of XML configuration.

That enable NB6.8 recognize XHTML files as facelets files if proper namespace is declared and also coloring, code folding, error checking for JSF tags, code completion for JSF libraries including documentation etc. There is also a new JSF category in the palette for XHTML files.

And also others technologies are upgraded. NetBeans 6.8 M1 now allows you to take advantage of the new features in Java Persistence 2.0, such as the Criteria API or integration with the Bean Validation specification.

The most expected feature of Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1 is the ability to use EJBs in ordinary web modules. Etc....

To sum up JPA 2.0, JSF 2.0, EJB 3.1, Servlet 3.0 and JAX-RS 1.0 are probably the most notable and important improvements in Java EE 6 compared to the previous version of the platform.

If you want to learn more about this features in NetBeans 6.8Milestone1 read this wiki page."

Blanka

Polyglot NetBeans: Let's continue the journey...

2009-08-25T10:47:14+00:00

Bistro!: OSGi dans visualvm

2009-08-14T15:10:24+00:00

Le concours de blog VisualVM m'a fait découvrir le plugin OSGi écrit à par Kiev (doctorant à Grenoble). Ca me plait bien.
Du coup, billets en anglais et en français.

Bistro!: Latest GlassFish Podcast episode: Antonio Goncalves

2009-08-08T21:46:52+00:00

It's been a while since the last GlassFish Podcast episode and even longer since the last interview, so here it goes - episode #36 an interview with Antonio Goncalves.

Antonio has many hats and this discussion covers a lot of ground starting with his recently published Java EE 6 book with GlassFish v3. We get into his favorite Java EE 6 feature, his role in the JCP as an individual contributor, his take on Spring vs. Java EE 6 and some thought on JSR 299 (the interview predates the inclusion of JSR 330 into Java EE 6). We also discuss Antonio's role as the leader of the Paris JUG inspiring more than a dozen other JUGs across the country.

Enjoy the episode.

Bistro!: While away, starting with the hot-off-the-press part -

2009-08-04T19:23:46+00:00

• Small (and welcome) Java EE 6 delay to accomodate JSR299/JSR330 (and to include both in the platform). Expect GlassFish v3 to shift as well.
• OpenDS 2.0 released - full Java LDAP server now ready for prime-time.
• Web Stack 1.5 released. More than an optimized and integrated (L)AMP stack it also buys you support for Hudson and uses IPS (like GlassFish v3) for fully relocatable installs.
• NetBeans 6.7.1 shipped. Now with JavaFX and lots of bug fixes (including some related to Maven support). You can simply update an existing 6.7 install. 6.8 will have Java EE 6 support and recent GlassFish v3 as the default (Milestone 1 is just out).
• JRuby guys moving to EngineYard (and confirming the GlassFish praises).
• GlassFish v2.1 patch 3, for paying customers.
• NetNewsWire now has web version via Google Reader

Bistro!: Five years of blogging

2009-07-15T09:07:35+00:00

Over the past five years my blogging have been less frequent. This is probably due to my focus on GlassFish (which still has me cover a lot of ground), to the other group blogs I co-author, and because of the tweeting I do. I'm starting to think that twitter is to blogging what email is to mail - showing just how lazy we all are.

Bistro!: Top reasons why GlassFish v3 is a lightweight server

2009-07-10T08:55:41+00:00

I have been involved in helping a couple of consultants put together a presentation on the future of app servers and one thing that struck me was that in the resulting slides, they equated lightweight appserver with the use of the Spring framework. Using Spring in WebSphere doesn't make any lighter. I don't think that deploying an archive with 90% being runtime qualifies as lightweight (hence the SpringSource tc and dm server offerings), but I also think that painting every application server as being monolithic and heavyweight is a gross caricature, so here are my top reasons why GlassFish *is* a lightweight application server.

#1 • Download size
For some people download size matters. For them and for everybody else, GlassFish v3 downloads start at 30MB for the web profile (get it here). The updatetool will then help you scale up or down from there. Of course you can also start with the "a la carte" approach and go even lighter (20MB for a functional RESTful+EJB31 server). Some others are fighting hard to fit on a single DVD or CD.

#2 • Pay for what you use
With the extensible architecture of GlassFish v3, services and containers and brought online only when artifacts using them are deployed to the runtime. Deploy your first WAR and the web container will take a couple of seconds to start. Deploy your second webapp in a fraction of a second. Remove the last webapp and the web container will not be restarted on subsequent server restarts. Some people call that on-demand services.

#3 • Fast (re)deployment
Beyond incremental compilation (which most IDE's offer nowadays) and deploy-on-change (simply save the source and reload the web page), the time to (re)deploy an application is key to a developer's productivity. The GlassFish team has spent time optimizing that process to offer sub-second redeploy time for simple applications. GlassFish v3 also offers the preservation of sessions across redeployments which is a pretty safe operation (new class-loader, new application) and costs less than 5 seconds to recreate a Spring context (for instance with the jpetstore demo on my laptop), and even less on traditional JavaEE webapps. This is all built into the product with no configuration or add-on required. Check out this recent (and short) screencast for an illustration.

#4 • Startup time
Even in the days of (fast) redeploy, startup time still matters to both developers and operations. GlassFish v3 starts in about 3 seconds with a warm felix cache. Starting the web container is about an extra 3 seconds. Deploying individual applications depends largely on their size and complexity but let's say that it starts at around 100ms and should not go beyond 30 seconds. Starting GlassFish v3 with Apache Roller already deployed (not exactly the lightest webapp there is out there) will cost you about 20 seconds.

#5 • Memory consumption
One might think the OSGi nature or the application server introduces an unwelcome memory overhead. For an application servers like GlassFish v3, that certainly isn't a problem as a base GlassFish v3 runtime is using less than 20MB (another "side effect" of the modular & extensible architecture) and a non-trivial application only 50MB of heap (as reported by visualvm). Not quite small enough to run on a feature phone, but that may well happen sooner than we all think, especially when using the Static mode (no OSGi) and the embedded api.

#6 • Spring *and* OSGi
No need to choose between standard JavaEE, Spring, and OSGi. You can have all of the above in a single integrated product. In fact you can even use the unmodified OSGi-fied Spring DM version of the framework, and make it available at the expense of a couple of clicks in the update tool. The HK2 layer in GlassFish v3 is abstracting OSGi away and manages to have GlassFish retain its lightweight feel while allowing for Java EE components to inject any OSGi-based declarative services at the expense of a standard @Resource annotation. I don't know if you think this lightweight but I certainly find this to be an elegant integration.

#7 • Open Source
GlassFish is open source, so you can make it whatever you want, even a heavyweight monster if you so decide! Certainly the barrier to entry for using GlassFish is very lightweight.

But the real question is - is GlassFish v3 lightweight for you(r application)?
Whatever the answer is, I'd love to hear your comments and experience!

Bistro!: Short screencast on GlassFish v3 session redeployment

2009-07-08T15:39:54+00:00

There are already a few demos out there showing the session state preservation across redeployments in GlassFish v3, but they all use a single page, so I thought I'd create a short one using an application closer to a real-life one (i.e. using a non-trivial framework like Spring). Of course this will work across any sort of framework and Spring is not a requirement ;)

Larger offline format here.

Preserving the session across redeployments is a GlassFish v3 feature while "deploy-on-save" is done by the plugin in the IDE talking to GlassFish. That and the session redeployment work equally well in NetBeans and Eclipse. IntelliJ also preserves the session across redeploys.

Polyglot NetBeans: NetBeans 6.7 is here!

2009-06-30T14:24:36+00:00

"Netbeans IDE 6.7 is here...You can download it now

NetBeans IDE 6.7 is integrated with Project Kenai, a collaborative environment for developers to host open-source projects. NetBeans also builds on the success of NetBeans 6.5 with native support for Maven; GlassFish, issue tracker and Hudson integrations; and enhancements to Java, PHP, Ruby, Groovy and C/C++. Highlights of the 6.7 release include support for JavaScript 1.7, Ruby Remote Debugging, and integration of the Java ME SDK 3.0.

If you want to know more about some of the new features read the posts below. And watch short videos about Kenai, Maven, Java Applications and so on...

New version is available in 20 languages. Some of them are fully supported by NB globalization team, some are product of community.

We hope you will enjoy new Netbeans and it will help you to create lot of successful programs ." Blanka

Bistro!: Which GlassFish version is right for me?

2009-06-29T08:16:00+00:00

GlassFish has several versions that you may have heard of. Each one attempts to address different needs. I've had several people in the last couple of weeks ask me which one they should use, so here's a quick list of features and reasons to use one more than the other.

• GlassFish v2.1: current JavaEE 5-certified and supported product. Offers centralized admin, clustering. v2.0 was released in September 2007 and v2.1 in March 2009 with the Enterprise Manager value add. All major IDE's (NetBeans, Eclipse, IntelliJ) have plugins to deploy to this version. GlassFish v2.1 update 3 is the latest version available for supported customers.

• GlassFish v3 Prelude: interesting if you want a lightweight Java EE 5 web container (no EJB, JMS, etc...) with admin tools. This is the first release using the modular OSGi architecture, IPS packaging format, and developer features such as preserve session across redeployments. This was released in November 2008 and is a supported product (although not a long-lived as traditional software at Sun). It also offers native deployment of Grails and Rails applications. Some people use this version in development and deploy to v2.1.

• GlassFish v3 Preview: while not yet a supported product, this is a more recent version building on the same foundation as the above "Prelude" version, only it now offers both a Web distribution and a full Java EE 6 (Preview) distribution. It has a number of improvements over the "Prelude" version (IPS and updatetool for instance) and certainly much closer to a fully-featured application server. The final version should ship in September 2009 and offer a JavaEE 6, single-instance architecture. At that point this will become a supported product. The centralized administration will come in the v3.1 release which will mean feature parity with v2.1. If you like bleeding edge stuff, promoted builds for v3 are here.

For more details on the releases, including sustaining (restricted) releases, please visit http://blogs.sun.com/GlassFishForBusiness/

Bistro!: Présentations de l'aquarium d'été - JavaOne, Java EE 6, GlassFish, Metro, OpenDS, Cloud, OpenSolaris

2009-06-29T03:57:09+00:00

Voici les présentations faites à la troisième édition de l'Aquarium Paris :
• Versions PDF.
• Les mêmes sur slideshare.net

Merci à tous les participants et en particulier à Jacky de Cap Gemini pour son retour sur GlassFish et son déplacement de Lille.
Pour ceux déçus par l'absence d'une présentation dédiée à JavaFX, je vous invite à vous rendre au ParisJUG ce 7 Juillet ou il en sera question en détails.

Bistro!: GlassFish et Java EE 6 à Niort mercredi prochain

2009-06-25T08:53:47+00:00

Antonio pour la partie Java EE 6 et votre serviteur pour GlassFish v3. Détails ICI.
Comme le dit Wadael, espérons que GlassFish y gagnera en assurances! ;-)

Bistro!: GlassFish v3 (custom) distributions with IPS

2009-06-24T05:00:00+00:00

In the last part of my 'GlassFish à la carte' series of blogs and screencasts there is a missing piece if you were to try to reproduce the scenario - the GlassFish v3 IPS package containing the definition of my custom distribution (a distribution could be thought as a product/implementation of the notion of a profile as defined in Java EE 6).

That custom distro is the set of core GlassFish v3 packages which are required by my application (in this case it was using JAX-RS and EJB 3.1). While most GlassFish packages are meant to contain some sort of artifact (most likely a collection of JAR files as explained in these posts), this "distro" package for GlassFish has no such artifact but rather a key depends section of the package prototype file.

You can find the source for building the package on the glassfish-repo project site. As you can see there, the list of required modules is simply expressed :

"depends" : { "pkg:/felix@1.8.0" : {"type" : "require"}, "pkg:/glassfish-amx@3.0-51" : {"type" : "require"}, "pkg:/glassfish-common@3.0-51" : {"type" : "require"}, "pkg:/glassfish-corba-omgapi@3.0.0-20" : {"type" : "require"}, "pkg:/glassfish-ejb-lite@3.0-51" : {"type" : "require"}, "pkg:/glassfish-grizzly@1.9.15-0" : {"type" : "require"}, "pkg:/glassfish-hk2@3.0-51" : {"type" : "require"}, "pkg:/glassfish-jca@3.0-51" : {"type" : "require"}, "pkg:/glassfish-jsf@2.0.0-13" : {"type" : "require"}, "pkg:/glassfish-jta@3.0-51" : {"type" : "require"}, "pkg:/glassfish-management@3.0-51" : {"type" : "require"}, "pkg:/glassfish-nucleus@3.0-51" : {"type" : "require"}, "pkg:/glassfish-web@3.0-51" : {"type" : "require"}, "pkg:/jersey@1.1.0-1.0" : {"type" : "require"}, },

Note that this requires using the http://pkg.glassfish.org/v3/dev repository which hosts the promoted builds of GlassFish v3. With a stable build (once GlassFish v3 is declared final), the explicit implementation could go away (mostly the -51's in the example above which refer to promoted build 51). Finally, the glassfish-jca module listed above should really not be required if it wasn't for a silly bug (that is fixed in the next promoted build).

So there it is, a really simple way to make sure a given set of packages will be present before you deploy your application. Of course the packages that make up a distribution do not need to all be core GlassFish package. In particular one could imagine including the Spring container as demoed here and discussed there.
Maybe we should create two such packages for the two official Web and Full distributions Sun offers for GlassFish v3.

Bistro!: GlassFish at the Jazoon Conference

2009-06-22T16:29:26+00:00

The GlassFish Day at Jazoon was really well attended (significantly more than last year) and is now over, so the rest of the conference can now start. This is a good time to go thru the list of GlassFish-related talks at the conference, so here it goes:

• James Gosling's Keynote
• Roberto on Java EE 6
• Jérôme and Ludo on GlassFish v3
• Java EE 6 BOF
• Hudson talk
• Ed's JSF 2.0 presentation
• Harold on Metro Web Services
• Ludo again, this time on JavaFX+GlassFish v3
• Ed on JavaFX+JavaEE

Slides for the GlassFish Day are being posted here.

Bistro!: L'aquarium d'été - ce vendredi 26 juin 2009

2009-06-21T21:32:26+00:00

La nouvelle édition de l'aquarium à Paris c'est cette semaine! Vendredi 26 juin, une journée pleine de contenu!
N'oubliez pas de vous inscrire: http://fr.sun.com/sunnews/events/2009/jun/open_source/
Nouvelle adresse: Capital 8 - 32, rue de Monceau.

Bistro!: GlassFish v3 a la carte screencast - Part 3 - Jersey and EJBs

2009-06-19T14:42:38+00:00

In the first screencast, I installed a minimal GlassFish v3 from a small bootstrap (IPS toolkit), created a domain and started the server. The second entry did something actually useful with GlassFish and two containers: Java Web and Spring. In this screencast, I layer a custom distribution on top of a GlassFish kernel. Enough to deploy a JAXR-RS / EJB 3.1 (lite) application.

For the sake of brevity this screencast is mostly command-line. It starts with the 5MB ips bootstrap and installs a pre-defined custom distribution which is enough to deploy the jersey-ejb sample application. The custom distribution is essentially an IPS package with no artifact, only a set of dependencies on other packages. For the curious out there, here is the step-by-step for the screencast :

bin/pkg set-publisher -P --enable -O http://pkg.glassfish.org/v3/dev dev.glassfish.org bin/pkg set-publisher --enable -O http://localhost:10001 localRepo bin/pkg install sample-distro bin/asadmin create-domain --instanceport 8080 --adminport 4848 mydomain bin/asadmin start-domain bin/asadmin deploy ~/jersey/jersey/samples/jersey-ejb/target/jersey-ejb.war open http://localhost:8080/jersey-ejb/

I hope this series of screencasts demystifies the IPS/packaging side of GlassFish and shows the interesting possibilities it offers to end-users.

Bistro!: GlassFish at Lyon JUG

2009-06-18T09:27:44+00:00

JUG's in France have been popping up here and there at an amazing rate in the past 18 months since Antonio and the team have started the Paris JUG. I think we're somewhere in the 12 JUGs or so. For a country that didn't have any really active one only 2 years ago that's just amazing.

I was down in Lyon earlier this week for a JUG meeting (this was only their third meeting) on Groovy and GlassFish where over 60 people showed up. Come to think of it, when adding up all the JUGs, I think we average about 1000 attendees very months, that's the equivalent of a pretty decent conference. The feedback I've received was pretty good. I did a demo-heavy presentation focused on GlassFish v3 (most importantly the modularity and extensibility) and the 30-minute Q&A session took me to demo v2 (Enterprise Manager), explain the pricing model and monetization strategy, discuss more generally the Java EE and app server statuses, and deflect the best I could some Oracle-related questions...

My slides are here and you can read some notes on the event here (in French).

Bistro!: Livre Java EE 6 (in english in the text) en dédicace ce samedi à Paris

2009-06-17T13:51:45+00:00

Antonio Goncalves :
" Je vous propose de nous retrouver samedi 20 juin à la librairie Le Monde En Tique de 15h50 à 18h pour une séance de dédicace. Le principe est simple : vous venez, vous achetez un exemplaire du livre (ou plusieurs exemplaires pour offrir à votre femme et à vos parents), et je vous écris un petit mot doux. C’est un bon deal non ? "

Détails ici.

Bistro!: GlassFish v3 a la carte screencast - Part 2

2009-06-12T11:32:12+00:00

In the first screencast, I installed a minimal GlassFish v3 from a small bootstrap (IPS toolkit), created a domain and started the server. This entry will actually do something useful with GlassFish and two containers: Java Web and Spring.

The Spring DM (OSGi) part of the demo is described in Jerome's GlassFish V3 Extensions, part 3 : Spring, Java EE 6 and OSGi blog entry. In the screencast, the manual install of the Spring bits is replaced by adding a new repository definition (a local one) and installing a single package from there. For the rest, the demo demonstrates how to extend GlassFish without using any GlassFish API and how to invoke an OSGi bundle service without using any OSGi API - the servlet injects the service by name using a standard @Resource annotation. Note that Jerome's most recent blog entry covers OSGi Declarative Services for a somewhat simpler approach.

The screencast was done using the dev/ repository, so your experience may vary as the boundaries of the IPS packages and their dependencies are still being worked. Also, instead of the default Felix console briefly shown, you could use the web console described by Sahoo.

The full-size (and offline) video is available here (15MB, video/x-m4v).
The next screencast will show how one can seamlessly add more GlassFish v3 features to obtain a "full" Java EE application server and still benefit from the modular architecture in terms of pay-as-you-grow (startup time, load-on-demand, memory consumption, ...).

Bistro!: How many bytes does it take to update a full GlassFish install?

2009-06-11T06:54:08+00:00

The answer is 24MB.
... and that's for an initial full install weighting 63MB. The reason for it being small (other than the fact that you *can* do such a full update) is that IPS, the packaging system behind GlassFish v3 works at the file level rather than with package granularity.

Your mileage may vary depending on the jump you're trying to make (in my case this was from b47 to b49).
Here's a quick replay of my experience : % bin/pkg set-authority -P -O http://pkg.glassfish.org/v3/dev --enable dev.glassfish.org % bin/pkg image-update DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB) Completed 32/32 198/198 24.10/24.10 PHASE ACTIONS Removal Phase 64/64 Install Phase 39/39 Update Phase 193/193 PHASE ITEMS Reading Existing Index 9/9 Indexing Packages 41/41

Voilà !

Bistro!: Lyon(JUG) mardi prochain - GlassFish, JavaOne, ...

2009-06-10T12:00:00+00:00

Je suis invité mardi prochain par le LyonJUG pour présenter GlassFish (détails et inscription, lieu). L'autre partie de la soirée (la première en fait) sera consacrée à Groovy.

J'y parlerai essentiellement de GlassFish v3 Preview disponible depuis JavaOne et en particulier des ses fonctionnalités pour développeurs et son extensibilité OSGi.

Bistro!: GlassFish v3 a la carte screencast - Part 1

2009-06-10T06:18:34+00:00

Given the modular approach taken in GlassFish v3 (170+ OSGi bundles in v3 Preview) and the IPS/pkg(5) tooling provided, I created a first screencast showing the following :
• install the IPS toolkit image (download), a 5MB bootstrap
• define the repository to get to the GlassFish v3 bits (pkg.glassfish.org/v3/dev/ in this case)
• install the minimum set of packages required to create and start a domain (using the pkg command-line and the graphical updatetool)

The full-size (and offline) video is available here (15MB, video/x-m4v).
Further screencasts will show how one can add selected features (containers) to deploy specific applications.

Of course you don't have to be fiddling around with the various GlassFish v3 packages and could also be downloading one of two GlassFish v3 Preview distributions: web profile and full Java EE 6. Even then you'll only pay for what you use.

Bistro!: Pre-versions GlassFish v3 et Java EE 6 disponibles

2009-05-31T08:00:00+00:00

Avec quelques heures d'avance sur le démarrage de JavaOne 2009, Sun vient d'annoncer la sortie de GlassFish v3 Preview (à ne pas confondre avec Prelude sorti l'année passée) qui propose une implémentation de Java EE 6 en attendant le mois de septembre et les versions finales.

GlassFish v3 Preview est disponible en deux versions pour refléter le profil Web défini par la spec Java EE 6 (la modularité du serveur et son updatetool permet de passer facilement d'une version à l'autre). Cette version propose une implémentation complète d'un appserver (contrairement à Prelude qui ne proposait qu'un web container). On y trouve donc un conteneur EJB 3.1 (local ou distant), JSR 299 et Bean Validation (merci JBoss), JAX-RS (Jersey), JSF 2.0 (Mojarra), JAX-WS 2.2 (Metro), et d'autres encore.

Bien entendu, le socle technique reste basé sur OSGi (par défaut Felix dans le cas de v3 Preview), l'extensibilité reste offerte par HK2 (pour n'avoir qu'une seule ligne de commande, un seul fichier de config et une seule console d'admin web extensible quels que soient les modules présents) et les fonctionnalités de productivité (temps de démarrage, deploy on change, préservation des sessions sur redéploiement) sont là et élargies à Eclipse (3.4) en plus de NetBeans (6.7 RC). Mon petit doigt me dit que tout ceci sera démontré lors de la technical keynote de JavaOne du mardi après-midi.

Il y a également le support des langages et frameworks dynamiques: Groovy/Grails et jRubyOnRails, mais aussi désormais Jython (encore en Release Candidate) et Django. Tous sont disponibles sur l'updatecenter (ou on trouve également un package hibernate). Au delà des profils Java EE 6, la modularité de GlassFish v3 permet de se monter un serveur à la carte et d'imaginer par exemple une solution légère alliant Grizzly et Jersey (une combinaison populaire).

Et maintenant, place à JavaOne!

Bistro!: GlassFish unconference - this Sunday

2009-05-29T17:04:16+00:00

What do Ted Goddard, Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart, Paul Sandoz, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Bill Shannon, Jeanfrancois Arcand, Larry Cable and Jerome Dochez have in common? They've all registered to attend the GlassFish Unconference this coming Sunday in San Francisco (1pm Hall A at Moscone Center, details in the previous link).

As a reminder this is a free event and the content will be based on the interest of the people who show up. So don't be shy and make sure you take this opportunity to pick the brains of the development team, provide feedback, and understand where the community and products are going. Here's some background on unconferences.

So far, popular topics include GlassFish (v3), OpenESB, Hudson, and REST/JAX-RS/Jersey.
Registration is recommended.

Bistro!: GlassFish @ Java AppServer Day (Genova)

2009-05-25T11:41:12+00:00

I was lucky to visit Genova last week for the Java AppServer Day organized by the local JUG. I tend to blindly trust the organizers of JUG-initiated events and this event was yet another good reason to keep on doing this.

The event had exactly 100 attendees and the format was 30-minute sessions with a round-table at the end. I went first and focused on GlassFish v3 since this was mostly a developer audience and clearly had no time to also cover the clustering/operations side of GlassFish in half an hour. I did try to do as many demos as possible around startup time, dynamic startup/shutdown of services, Deploy on save in NetBeans, Session preservation across redeploys with a non-trivial application, extending GFv3 with a Spring container (available right from a local update center repository) to demonstrate OSGI-based GlassFish v3 extensibility as detailed in Jerome's latest blog entry.

JBoss' Alessio (Web Services lead) alluded to JBoss 5.1 being very close to being released (and indeed it has been since). Now waiting for the supported version ;) He also mentioned OSGi as being a priority for the next releases. Of course having Oracle in the room made the exercise quite interesting. I met Paolo, an Oracle "veteran" and a likely future colleague :) and got to listen to an Oracle middleware presentation (I hadn't seen one in ages and certainly not since the BEA integration). Paolo focused on the operations side (which arguably WebLogic does fairly well) including Coherence, JRockit and Work Manager. Finally Alef, a SpringSource founder (but no longer an employee) focused on OSGi and dmServer. I think his presentation was more didactic than mine on the OSGi front, but our demos certainly felt very similar.

Thanks to Paolo and the rest of the organizers, this was a great event, I wish I could have stayed a bit longer, the city looks beautiful!

Bistro!: GlassFish Prague Workshop - Done!

2009-05-15T16:10:57+00:00

This 2-day GlassFish workshop in beautiful Prague is now over and a good chunk of the slides are now available from the event wiki.

With 50 people in the room we had a full house with people from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, France, Spain, Slovakia, UK, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands, etc... I believe the content (thanks to all the presenters) and the format were good and I certainly enjoyed the great conversations during and after the presentations. The welcome reception at the end of the first day was certainly a nice moment (check out the photo of the 2 self-cooling kegs of beer, 20 liters/5+ gallons each!).

What made the event interesting also to me was the mix of Sun employees (product engineers, pre-sales, consultants, support engineers, even sales reps), but also partners and customers. We certainly tried to be open about many things, from the way we build the software and the community to the way to how we do business (not sharing any customer information without their consent of course). Also the refreshing part of this workshop was that actually very little time was spent talking about Oracle ;)

We will be running a similar event in Zurich during the first day of Jazoon (free event as well, only one-day long and probably no hands-on-lab). Details and registration here: GlassFish Day, June 22nd. Zurich.

Bistro!: GlassFish European workshop kicking off tomorrow in Prague

2009-05-10T17:15:44+00:00

GlassFish has had a couple of workshops in California and it's now time to swim to Prague for two days starting tomorrow. Registration for the workshop was carried out pretty quietly given the maximum number of people we could easily accomodate here in the Sun office (less than 100) and the rate at which seats were going out.

Nevertheless this should be a great occasion to cover various GlassFish topics, from Portfolio to hands-on labs for clustering, centralized admin, OpenESB (Fuji really), and more by John Clingan (Product Manager), Jerome Dochez (GlassFish Architect) and other very fine speakers. As always I'm confident that the best part will be the socializing and I look forward to finding out more about uses of GlassFish around Europe and discussing the future of the product and community.

Now is also probably a good time to remind you that we'll have a free GlassFish Day in Zurich at the Jazoon conference on Monday 22nd June and the Java Application Server day on May 21st in Genova later this month.

Bistro!: Java Application Server Day 2009

2009-05-07T15:43:02+00:00

The Genova Java User Group is organizing the App Server Day in two weeks in Genova and have been invited to represent GlassFish.

I think App Servers are exciting again. I like to compare it to how dull operating systems were before zfs, dtrace, and more generally virtualization came along. All the participants to this event have real innovations to offer and this should be a fun day comparing and contrasting the various approaches!

Make sure you register. The organizers seem to be really on top of this and I'm looking forward to my first time in Gênes.

Bistro!: SDPY - Java EE 5 is 3 years old

2009-05-02T09:56:57+00:00

Java EE 5 is 3 years old. GlassFish v1 will hit the same milestone in a few days.
Java EE 6 and GlassFish v3 are scheduled for the fall with an interim release of the app server at JavaOne next month.

Polyglot NetBeans: Python and NetBeans

2009-04-28T13:08:38+00:00

Introduction to Python support in NB prepared by Blanka:

"Some time ago you could notice that in the main download page new menu item appeared.

It is Python Early Access.

Python is a dynamic object-oriented programming language that can be used for many kinds of software development. You can download it by clicking on that item or is also available as a plugin for NetBeans 6.5 in Tools - Plugins.

Let's go thought creating a new project. Python is displayed as the project when only the Python EA version of the IDE has been installed on your machine. Other categories may appear if Python EA was added to the IDE as a plugin. New Project wizard offers you creating of a new python project from a template, or importing existing projects.

In the next step you enter the Project Name and select the version of Python you want to use from the drop down list. You can manage this at any time in the Properties of the project (right click on the project). Then click Finish to create the project.

Note that the project is open in the Source Editor of the IDE, displaying basic information, as seen in the following image. Netbeans IDE automatically documents the author and date of the project along with providing a short sample print "Hello" program.

The NetBeans editor for Python supports Smart Indent, Outdent, and Pair matching, additional to syntactic and semantic highlighting, code folding, instant rename refactoring, mark occurrences, finding undefined names, and Quick Fixes. Code completion is available for local function and variable names as well as Python keywords. The editor also assists you by inserting and fixing import statements.

If you want to try more than just creating the new project, you can follow Python tutorials on the netbeans pages: Developing a Python Application Using NetBeans IDE or Introduction to Python EA in NetBeans IDE."

Bistro!: SDPY - Happy 5th B-day BSC!

2009-04-27T10:59:52+00:00

According to my archives, blogs.sun.com is turning 5 today. So much has happened in this period of time and I can only think of positive benefits this service brought to Sun, both the employees and the company.

Bistro!: Antonio's book on Java EE 6 (and GlassFish v3)

2009-04-26T20:04:35+00:00

Antonio Goncalves seems to have just shipped his work for his new Java EE 6 book. It sounds like the very first one to cover this topic which is quite a challenge given the specification will be final only in a few months. In the mean time, I wish Antonio the best for JavaOne sales! He's certainly very well positioned to write such a book - at the heart of the matter, yet not a "vendor" but rather a exemplary Java community member.

GlassFish v3 as covered in this book (great to have GlassFish be part of the title!) is also a moving target since "Prelude" was released last year with a Java EE 5 web container and previews of EJB 3.1 and JSF 2.0 available via the update center. In the mean time, only promoted builds of the Java EE 6 work have been made available, so I hope Antonio will have a chance the refresh the content when Java EE 6 and GlassFish v3 ship later this year in a second edition of the book.

Bistro!: Different strategies for building different packages (for GlassFish v3)

2009-04-22T15:22:59+00:00

In my previous two posts (related to building packages for GlassFish), I covered the basics of the Update Center for GlassFish v3 and the underlying IPS/pkg(5) technology and what it takes to build a Hibernate package for GlassFish v3.

One key part that is still missing is the process (or social) side of things - how does one get to commit to the glassfish-repo project, and maybe more importantly, how does a community package make its way to the pkg.glassfish.org/v3prelude/contrib/ repository that is wired into every single GlassFish v3 distribution? This part needs a little more fine tuning and I will cover it soon in a dedicated post. In the mean time, I encourage you to join the glassfish-repo project as a developer.

In this post I'll cover the different possible natures for GlassFish v3 packages beyond the (rather simple) Hibernate example described earlier and available here to study. As you will see the spectrum of packages for GlassFish can be quite large.

1/ Frameworks and libraries
Examples include web frameworks, JDBC drivers, and any other technology that simply requires a set of JAR files to be available from the application running in GlassFish. Such JAR libraries should be placed into GLASSFISH_HOME/glassfish/lib. There is no need to restart GlassFish unless this is a new version of a library with the same JAR file name (individual applications may need to be restarted though). Note it is recommended that you do not touch the default GLASSFISH_HOME/glassfish/domains/domain1 domain. This is because putting any IPS-controlled file in that directory and having GlassFish (or the developer) modify or remove it will show up as a "partially installed" package.
This package use-case is the simple approach discussed in the previous Hibernate use-case.

2/ Applications running in GlassFish
Assuming an application packaged in a WAR, JAR, or EAR has no external resource dependency (connection pool, JMS queue, etc..), the IPS package can simply place the artifact in the autodeploy directory of a domain. As stated above the issue is that there is no guaranty that domain1 exists. One approach is to create IPS packages with a dependency on another IPS package responsible for creating a generic "updatecenter" domain (name TBD) thus installing that package/domain if it's not already there. This would also avoid each application shipping with its own domain causing unnecessary space to be used, additional admin tasks to manage the domains, and potential port conflicts. Notable exceptions would be packages requiring considerable setup of the domain (specific jvm options, data-sources or other resources pre-configured, etc.). In this case, shipping the application with a pre-configured domain actually makes more sense.

With the approach of placing the application in the updatecenter/autodeploy directory, removing the package will delete the archive from the autodeploy directory and thus cause the application to be undeployed. Removing the "updatecenter" package will cause the applications depending on it to be no longer available as the domain directory would be deleted. Ideally the domain needs to be stopped first.

3/ Applications independent of GlassFish
Applications running in a separate process can be installed as top level directories and thus be quite independent from the GlassFish v3 runtime bits. Sample packages include monitoring applications, tools, databases, etc. In this case, laying out files at the root of the target/stage staging area will result in a top level install sitting next to GlassFish, similar to JavaDB in the current GlassFish v3 builds. Such a tool can then reference the glassfish v3 install using ../glassfish. You may also want to add binaries to glassfish/bin referencing your application or tool. In the case of JavaDB, there is even an additional ../glassfish/bin/asadmin command (start-database) and that takes us to the next type of GlassFish packages: extensions to the runtime and admin tools.

4/ GlassFish extensions (HK2/OSGi components)
Being modular in its own right, GlassFish supports placing JAR files under the glassfish/modules directory. Of course the artifacts placed there need to adhere to certain rules fairly well documented in the Add-On Component Development Guide (especially the "Writing HK2 Components" and "Adding Container Capabilities" sections). Note you can also extend the admin console, the CLI, and add monitoring capabilities. All of these tasks are quite orthogonal to the (rather lightweight) effort of producing the actual IP package placing the artifacts into the GlassFish modules directory (check the above "Frameworks and libraries" section for how to drop files into a specific directory).

A word on (post-)install scripts
As you can see in the discussion above, it's all about laying out files on disk. GlassFish/IPS packages cannot start/stop processes or run scripts during or after time install by default (if you really need pre/post actions, read this and this). Of course you can (and are actually encouraged) to provide instructions in the package description (in the prototype file), a README.txt file that remains on disk after install, and possibly scripts to be manually executed after the install (to pass some asadmin commands) or prior to some uninstall (like stopping a domain). Remember though that factory configs are best (albeit not always possible).

You should note that the above are merely suggestions for how to build packages for GlassFish v3, not quite best practices at this point, so we're more than happy receiving feedback and suggestions! As you can see the spectrum of packages for GlassFish can be quite large.

There should be at least two more part to this series: how to get your package into the public contrib/ repository and a more complex package example requiring a domain (and thus a dependency on another IPS package).

Bistro!: More with "deploy --libraries" in GlassFish

2009-04-15T12:08:00+00:00

A few months back Sahoo mentioned the use of "asadmin deploy --libraries" in the comments section as an effective way to deal with libraries. I recently had two people ask me about the behavior of GlassFish when multiple applications are deployed with --libraries pointing to the set jar file so I thought I'd share here what I found (this is for GlassFish v2.x). Thanks to Siva and Hong for the help there.

When multiple applications have --libraries pointing to the same jar, the classloading infrastructure tries to "share" the jar by loading it in the same classloader.

A side effect of this is that modifications to the jar require the undeployment and deployment of the application (along with its --libraries option) for it to use the updated version of the library. A simple deployment will trigger a ClassNotFoundException.

Note that it is your responsibility to keep track of all the applications using a given library and to do an undeploy/deploy for all of them as you may otherwise end up having different applications using different versions of the library.

The other option, which doesn't require the keep track of the applications using a given library, is to update the library bits and simply restart the server. Of course that has other drawbacks...

Bistro!: Sample Hibernate Community Package for GlassFish v3

2009-04-15T03:06:00+00:00

This is the second of a series of entries for people interested in producing packages for GlassFish v3 and hosting them on a live repository. The previous entry is IPS/pkg(5) crash-course for GlassFish v3 community package developers - Part 1. The next entry is here: Different strategies for building different packages (for GlassFish v3).

In this entry, we'll go through the various parts required to make the Hibernate library available to end-users via the GlassFish v3 Update Center. This enables developers to add this library with a single step, thus avoiding various well-known jar/classloader issues. In a team of multiple developers, all can install the library in the same manner. This provisioning/install approach can be extended beyond the simple use of a library, but let's start with something simple (more in other entries).

As introduced in the previous entry the glassfish-repo project is where it all happens. It provides a bootstrapping mechanism to abstract away the low-level details of creating and publishing IPS packages. Looking at the code hosted on glassfish-repo, you'll find a top-level directory called packager/ which has sub-directories, each corresponding to an IPS package for GlassFish v3.

Setup
There's a bit of setup described here for the following:
• Update Center 2.x toolkit image. This is the cross-platform bootstrap code needed for creating, publishing, installing, and installing IPS packages. Get it from http://wikis.sun.com/display/IpsBestPractices/Downloads. You will need to add pkg/bin and pkg/python2.4-minimal/bin to your PATH
and pkg/python2.4-minimal/lib and pkg/vendor-packages to LD_LIBRARY_PATH. You will not manipulate this toolkit yourself, a Maven plugin will do it for you.
>• Subversion (to check out the project code). This is not needed if you create your own local directory structure and don't intend to publish back to this glassfish-repo project (although we'd love for you to share as much as you possibly can).
• Maven 2.0.9 (everything is built using Maven2 in GlassFish v3 btw).
• JDK 6

Key files and directories
There are really three key files and a directory for building an IPS package (this is documented here, so inlining it here for brevity) :
• packager/package-name/pom.xml, the Maven config file to describe any dependency used when building the IPS package and the Maven profile/plugin that does all the packaging magic for you.
• packager/package-name/build.xml, the ANT script that lays out the files on disk as they should be installed on the target GlassFish instance.
• packager/package-name/src/main/resources/pkg_proto.py is called the prototype file and it contains the metadata required to build the package (name, version, license, and various attributes). The file format is well-documented here.
• packager/package-name/target/stage is the staging area where the above ANT script should layout the files (with proper permissions) required by the IPS package. This is the root of a glassfish v3 install.

Before looking at the Hibernate example, consider studying packager/sample-package and using it as a template for your own packages.

Authoring the Hibernate IPS package example
The Hibernate package artifacts available from the glassfish-repo project has the following interesting content (click on the filenames to see the entire content):

• packager/package-name/pom.xml contains the existing Maven profile and plugin definition encapsulating the IPS logic and adds a dependency to the hibernate-ips artifact (version 3.4.0.1) hosted on the java.net Maven2 repository : <dependency> <groupId>org.glassfish-repo.packager</groupId> <artifactId>hibernate-ips</artifactId> <version>3.4.0.1</version> <type>zip</type> </dependency>

• packager/package-name/build.xml simply creates the target/stage directory and places the various libraries required by Hibernate into the lib/ directory, thus making the framework available to all the applications deployed in a domain or instance related to the GlassFish install for which users will be installing this package. Check this link for how to best use the "Common Class Loader" and decide where you need to place your jar files. Optionally you can use the <attachArtifact> tag to create an .ipstgz file (also discussed here) to archive the work done by this script.

• packager/package-name/src/main/resources/pkg_proto.py contains pretty self-explanatory metadata for the IPS package (name, version, summary, description, and classification). In particular this is where you reference the location of the LICENSE.txt file (name and location can be different). dirtrees offers a way to take a subset of what is in the staging area by explicitly listing the directories that should be considered as being part of the IPS package. More documentation on the format of the file can be found here. Most of this is presented to the user when listing or installing the package. There is no dependency specified for this package. If you are not familiar with the Python syntax, I would suggest you look at IDE's (such as NetBeans) offering Python support (color-syntaxing, etc...) to avoid debugging issues late in the build process.

• packager/package-name/target/stage contains a single "glassfish" subdirectory that corresponds to the top-level directory in a GlassFish v3 prelude install and all the Hibernate JAR files are placed into the lib/ directory of the appserver install. This translates into having them placed in GLASSFISH_V3_INSTALL/glassfish/lib. Note that you shouldn't assume the presence of any particular domain such as "domain1" (more on that in another post).

Publishing and testing
Building and publishing is really a single-step process with IPS so you need to start a local repository using:
$ pkg.depotd -d ips-toolkit-dir/pkg -p 10000 --rebuild (running on part 10000. Full documentation here.

At that point, you can simply invoke maven from the package directory root (packager/hibernate in our case) with the appropriate repository URL, the path to the python binary, and the "ips" profile name :
$ mvn -Drepo.url=http://localhost:10000 -Dpython=ips-toolkit-dir/pkg/python2.4-minimal/bin/python -P ips

Once the package is successfully packaged, you can use GlassFish's Update Tool (GF_V3_INSTALL/bin/updatetool) or the pkg CLI to :
• add http://localhost:10000 as an additional repository
• test the package

Another post will soon cover how packages can make their way on to the "live" repository.

If you're interested in the maven-makepkgs-plugin logic/magic used build the IPS on your behalf, read the project's main page, and this post by Kohsuke. You'll find out how to build a package with a single src/proto.py file (no ANT) and getting most of it's metadata straight from Maven.

Going further...
Upcoming entries will covers the process to actually publish your packages to the GlassFish http://pkg.glassfish.org/v3prelude/contrib/ repository. This entry covers Different strategies for building different packages (for GlassFish v3). Expect also more entries on building more advanced packages.

Bistro!: GlassFish swimming to CommunityOne North (April 15th), and a beer meetup

2009-04-14T19:12:47+00:00

CommunityOne North is happening tomorrow is Oslo, Norway. A single day (free of charge and totally sold out) really packed with many sessions on many different topics (as in any good C1 conference). Simon Phipps (Sun) and Håkon Wium Lie (Opera) are the two keynote speakers.

GlassFish and Java EE are well represented with sessions on GlassFish v3, migrating to and writing with Java EE 5, a session on Sailfin by Ericsson, Hudson for performance testing, and more.

Whether or not you are attending the conference (and if you're not attending the MamaMia musical) on Wednesday evening and are at all interested in GlassFish, you should consider coming to the GlassFish Meet-Up at Hard-Rock Café (map) from 4:30pm-6:pm. Courtesy of the Sun GlassFish team! Please add a comment to this blog post or send email if you plan on joining.

Polyglot NetBeans: NetBeans 6.7 Milestone 3 and its new features

2009-04-08T20:55:11+00:00

Recently Blanka was playing with the newest build of NetBeans 6.7. The IDE in version 6.7, which is still under development, achieved its Milestone #3!
Here are Blanka's comments on few new NB M3 features:

"What is new in NetBeans 6.7

NetBeans team releases NB 6.7 Milestone 3, that offers new interesting features like Kenai Integration or new features in PHP, C/C++, Profiler or Maven. Let's have a look at the most interesting ones. First of all you can Download NetBeans IDE 6.7 Milestone 3.

First you will register some changes in the main menu. Instead of items “Profile” and “Versioning”, there is only “Team”. Also some sub-menus differed.

Totally new thing is that the IDE now integrates with Kenai.com to support typical developer workflow. You can find it under the new item “Team - Kenai”.
To start playing with the Kenai integration in the IDE, you can first try to search and open existing projects on Kenai and get their sources, which does not require login. To get more involved, create an account on Kenai.com, and bookmark some projects or ask for membership. To create your own project, you need to ask for project creation permission first (will not be required when NB 6.7 is released).
More you can see in the Kenai window (Kenai under the item “Window” in the main menu), get projects' sources, issues, and other associated services and information or open, edit and create issues for given Kenai projects, directly in the IDE.

Maven is a framework that provides help with managing the project lifecycle, including building and managing dependencies. Maven projects follow a set of standards that are described with a project object model (POM) to ensure consistency between projects. You can create new project “File – New Project – Maven”.
New multi-tabbed artifact details viewer is now available, accessible from Maven Repository Browser (“Window – Other – Maven Repository Browser”) or Maven section of Quick Search toolbar field.
"Basic" tab shows basic artifact's info, versions and related artifacts.
"Project" tab shows artifact project's info like links to bug tracking, source management, mailing lists etc.
"Classpath" tab shows direct dependencies in lists
"Graph" tab shows transitive dependency graph, see special section below

Hudson monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs run by cron. Among those things, current Hudson focuses on the following two jobs: Building/testing software projects continuously and Monitoring executions of externally-run jobs

Start by specifying the location of your Hudson server under “Window - Services” and there should be Hudson.

If you don't have a job for your project, the IDE can help you make one. Currently Maven and Java SE project types are supported, as are Subversion and Mercurial for the SCM. You can right-click your server node, or use “Team - New Continuous Build”. Browse your hosted jobs and their builds. You can also browse the job's workspace, and artifacts from a build. The console from a build can be viewed in the IDE's output window. You should also get notifications in the status bar when a build fails."

Bistro!: IPS/pkg(5) crash-course for GlassFish v3 community package developers - Part 1

2009-04-06T10:52:45+00:00

This is the first of a series of entries for people interested in producing packages for GlassFish v3 and hosting them on a live repository. Part 2 describing the Hibernate package is here. Part 3 discussing different strategies for building different packages is there.

GlassFish v3 (starting with the "Prelude" release from last Fall) uses IPS, aka pkg(5), to manage the various bits and pieces (modules or packages) of the application server. IPS stands for Image Packaging System and comes from the OpenSolaris land and gives GlassFish v3 a graphical (bin/updatetool) and CLI (bin/pkg) tools to manage packages, those that come with GlassFish and the ones available from IPS repositories. The new web admin console also integrates an IPS client. These tools let you browse, install, update, and remove packages very similar to Synaptic/apt, Eclipse, or NetBeans (note that this is different from the technology used for the update center in GlassFish v2). This "Getting Started" is a great intro to using the Update Center.

If you're interested in IPS, there's a bunch of resources around IPS and this IPS primer by Kohsuke is one such good resource for a pragmatic view and tools such as makepkgs, and recommandations for testing packages and moving them around. This current blog entry focuses on the GlassFish perspective and in particular for people interested in creating they're own packages to add features or applications to GlassFish. In the case of GlassFish v3 Prelude, existing packages are listed directly on the various repositories:
• pkg.glassfish.org/v3prelude/dev/
• pkg.glassfish.org/v3prelude/contrib/
• pkg.sun.com/glassfish/v3prelude/contrib/
"% bin/pkg authority" lists registered repositories while "% bin/updatetool" provides an equivalent but graphical view.

There are potentially really different sorts of packages that can be installed via IPS and the GlassFish Update Center: frameworks, Java EE applications, standalone applications, and GlassFish extensions. Future blogs will go into each of those but, in a nutshell, it's all about laying out files on disk and adding some extra metadata to the package itself (name, license, etc...).

IPS is also used throughout the middleware organization at Sun to deliver its software and updatecenter2.dev.java.net is the project that defines a portable (not just OpenSolaris) environment and tools to make this happen. In particular, you will most likely need a pre-installed Toolkit Image specific to the platform used for producing the packages (IPS is written in Python and this toolkit contains the pkg binary, a minimal Python 1.4 runtime, and a number of Java APIs).

The first thing you probably need to know is that glassfish-repo.dev.java.net is the place to start to avoid having to understand the intricacies of IPS. This is where you will be asked to provide :
• your artifacts (the actual files or a Maven dependency expressed in pom.xml)
• license and readme files
• a simple python file containing additional meta-data: version, description, dependencies, and more
• a build.xml ANT script laying out the bits in a staging area

My next entry in this series walks through the existing "hibernate" package available in source format on glassfish-repo and already live in the contrib GlassFish v3 Prelude repository.

Bistro!: GlassFish l'aquarium in Paris - Presentation Slides

2009-04-03T10:55:57+00:00

The latest GlassFish Community Day in Paris dubbed "l'aquarium" took place this past Monday. The agenda covered Java EE 6, GlassFish Portfolio (including ESB and WebSpace) but also MySQL and OpenSSO. The other interesting part is the large number (almost half) of non-Sun speakers. Here are the slides for the various presentations (some in French, most in English). Thanks to all the speakers and to the attendees (I hope you like the new GlassFish shirt!).

• "Bienvenue et Introduction GlassFish Portfolio", Jean-Yves Pronier (SlideShare, PDF)
• "Java EE 6", Roberto Chinnici (SlideShare, PDF)
• "GlassFish v3, en route Java EE 6", Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine (SlideShare, PDF)
• "GlassFish Web Space", Patrice Goutin (SlideShare, PDF)
• "Retour d'expérience OpenMQ (1)", Jérôme Molière, Mentor/J (SlideShare, PDF)
• "GlassFish Enterprise 2.1, production", Didier Burkhalter, Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine (SlideShare, PDF)
• "Transaction support, guaranty of delivery and consistency with Glassfish ESB BPEL", Paul Perez et Bruno Sinkovic, Pymma Consulting (Source from Pymma Consulting)
• "Retour d'expérience OpenMQ (2)", François Ostyn (SlideShare, PDF)
• "Authentification Web unique, Fédération d'identité et sécurisation de services Web .Net et Java avec OpenSSO", Alain Barbier, Sun Microsystems et Stève Sfartz, Microsoft (SlideShare, PDF)
• "MySQL HA Solutions", Lenz Grimmer (SlideShare, PDF)

Bistro!: Grails 1.1 for GlassFish v2 (via the UC)

2009-04-01T12:40:28+00:00

Vivek and team are bringing you the recently released Grails 1.1 via the GlassFish v2 Update Center (GLASSFISH_INSTALL/updatecenter/bin/updatetool).

Bistro!: L'aquarium de printemps...

2009-03-30T21:16:38+00:00

... c'est demain mardi (enfin peut-être aujourd'hui pour ceux qui ne sont pas scotchés à leur ordinateur) : http://www.solutionslinux.fr/cycle_specifique.php?pg=4_17&track=3. Ne loupez pas la première session sur Java EE 6 et la dernière sur MySQL (solutions de mise en haute dispo). Entre les deux le contenu me parait solide : retours d'expérience, interop identité avec Microsoft, nouveautés GlassFish v2.1, tour du nouveau produit WebSpace, et ESB avancé avec Pymma consulting. Presque 50% d'intervenants externes à Sun!