The Aquarium

A status on JAX-RS 2.0. Early Draft.

alexismp — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:00:00 +0000

With the Early Draft of JAX-RS 2.0 review period closed for a little while now, here's Arun's walk through the technology's new and improved features.

The Client API seems to be a very popular feature and one that seems pretty stable at this point. Filters and Handlers is another set of new features enabling interception of requests and responses while Hypermedia, a founding principle for REST, is better supported. JAX-RS 2.0 also offers the ability to validation parameters with BeanValidation, introduces asynchronous processing (returning Future objects on the client side) and finally better connection negotiation. Read all about it here.

JAX-RS has become an important component of the Java EE platform and the cloud theme going forward is only making it even more relevant. Check out this earlier post for Marek's (co Spec Lead on JAX-RS 2.0) take on where the JSR stands.

GlassFish 3.1.2 RC3 is here

alexismp — Thu, 9 Feb 2012 19:28:17 +0000

GlassFish 3.1.2 Build 21 is now available and flagged as RC3.
Get it while it's hot, it may be the final build if we don't run into major issues. We've never been so close to a final 3.1.2 release! (do I sound like a broken record or am I just excited that this great release is finally here? ;)

Yet another Java EE 7 spec - WebSocket is JSR 356!

alexismp — Thu, 9 Feb 2012 07:00:00 +0000

JSR 356 has been filed by Oracle : "Java API for WebSocket". The spec lead is Danny Coward and this JSR is scheduled for inclusion in Java EE 7

While it's great to have both server and client support for WebSocket in Grizzly and GlassFish, it's probably even better to have a standard to encourage portable code. The Review Ballot is scheduled to start on 21 Feb, 2012.

With this JSR, I believe the list for Java EE 7 is now complete. You can get the full list in the latest issue of the Java Magazine and catch recent posts using the javaee7 tag.

Grizzly now with AHC-powered WebSocket client

alexismp — Wed, 8 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

With the recent release of Async HTTP Client (AHC) 1.7.0, Ryan has details on how this impacts Grizzly to essentially provide support for WebSocket clients.

Ryan covers the new grizzly-http-client Maven artifact for AHC and introduces UpgradeHandler, WebSocketListener, WebSocket interfaces for WebSocket support with a short but complete working sample.

With this release, Grizzly now provides support for both sides of the WebSocket wire. Both GlassFish 3.1.2 and of course 4.0 will offer support for the final version of server-side WebSocket. if you're eager to use the technology in your application, then you should try out recent builds of 3.1.2 and let us know how things work for you.

Masoud Kalali on the GlassFish Team!

alexismp — Wed, 8 Feb 2012 07:00:00 +0000

Masoud Kalali is the latest addition to our GlassFish team and probably, of the recent hires, the one with the longest resume.

He's a Java Developer (of course), a blogger, a book author (a few refcardz too), a JCP Expert Group member, and much more.

Masoud will be working on configuration, security (he did write a book on the subject) as well as building PaaS management and infrastructure features.

Welcome Masoud!

Last call for the new TheAquarium Feed

alexismp — Tue, 7 Feb 2012 17:00:00 +0000

Hopefully by now you've all adjusted your feeds to the updated one for this blog : blogs.oracle.com/theaquarium/feed/entries/atom.

Redirects you may have been using are going away soon. Sorry...

The latest Java Magazine issue is out and it's all about JavaEE!

alexismp — Tue, 7 Feb 2012 07:00:00 +0000

Well, okay not all of it is about JavaEE but you'll find the following in this issue of the Java Magazine :

• An interview with Cameron Purdy, VP of development on why Java EE is ideally suited for the cloud.
• A "Lightweight PubSub (with Java EE 6) article by Adam "Rockstar" Bien.
• Julien Ponge's first part to a series of GlassFish-related articles: "clustering and HA made simple with GlassFish".
• Devoxx 2011 Java EE 7 coverage.
• A complete list of Java EE 7 JSRs (stay up to date by following the jcp tag here).
• An interview with Mollom's Dries Buytaert on "Winning the War Against Spam with Java" (a follow-up to this GlassFish story).
• Part 2 of Max' Introduction to RESTful Web Services.
• An introduction to jHome.

Other than the technical (Java EE and GlassFish-related) aspect, I find the spam fighting discussion in the Mollom interview to be fascinating.

POJOMapping in Jersey for type-safe clients

alexismp — Mon, 6 Feb 2012 07:54:00 +0000

Over on his blog, Jason Lee has a detailed post on the new POJOMapping feature in Jersey/GlassFish which offers strongly-typed client API's and illustrates this with a GlassFish Cluster administration sample.

The post shows how to enable POJOMapping with a Jersey servlet initialization parameter and goes on to show the Cluster domain model. An archive with the entire sample is available there.

Tab Sweep - Remote GlassFish on EC2, JavaEE 6 intro, Java 7 readiness, WADL, losing JCP voting rights, ...

alexismp — Sat, 4 Feb 2012 13:37:00 +0000

Note: if you're reading this using a feedreader, please make sure you've updated to the updated TheAquarium feed.

Recent Tips and News on Java, Java EE 6, GlassFish & more :

• Asadmin with Remote GlassFish (on EC2) (Bobby)
• Easy OAuth using DaliCore and GlassFish (Joeri)
• Introduction to Java Enterprise Edition 6 (JTV Technology Blog)
• Container based authentication with JSPWiki, GlassFish and OpenDJ (Dave)
• Exception "java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: object is not an instance of declaring class" And Solution (Adam)
• JCP's Evolution into Openness Continues: Lost Voting Rights and JSR 355 (java.net)
• Server side action methods on JSF ValueChange events using AJAX listeners (Lincoln)
• Gentle introduction to WADL (in Java) (Tomasz)
• Is your project ready for Java 7? (Dmitry)
• XMPP/Vorpal Screencast: Are you there? (Chuk)

GlassFish 3.1.2 Release Candidate builds are here!

alexismp — Fri, 3 Feb 2012 13:29:56 +0000

GlassFish 3.1.2 has never been so close to a GA/FCS release with promoted build b19 now available as Release Candidate (RC) 1. In fact you might as well go straight to RC2 (build 20), also now available from the promoted builds page.

If you're not sure which archive to use, try this one. Another RC build (RC3) is planned in the next few days. Hopefully it'll be the last one before the product ships.

So make sure you test your applications work properly with the latest promoted build and check out recent blog posts on 3.1.2 if you're wondering what to expect from this release. See you in a short while for a stable public release!

Now you know what to do over the week-end! :)

Cumulogic, yet another PaaS platform for GlassFish

alexismp — Thu, 2 Feb 2012 22:00:00 +0000

Cumulogic is another PaaS provider offering Java as a platform and specifically GlassFish 3.1.1 as of their December 2011 release.

CumuLogic PaaS has a dual public and private cloud strategy and support for Amazon EC2, OpenStack, Citrix-CloudStack, Eucalyptus, and VMware vSphere. It also offers RESTful APIs to manage the application lifecycle, and PaaS administration APIs to manage and monitor the platform.

For more details, you can read their data sheet, one where you'll learn that James Gosling is one of the company's advisors.

Java EE 6 samples delivered to your door step

alexismp — Wed, 1 Feb 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Arun has a blog reminding folks about the Java EE 6 samples that ship with the SDK.

The list of code samples is pretty long and a good complement to the Java EE 6 Tutorial.

Note you can also access these samples from any GlassFish install (not just from the SDK) by adding the missing repository using :
% <install-dir>/bin/pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.sun.com/javaeesdk/6/release/ JavaEE6SDK
% <install-dir>/bin/pkg list -a | grep samples
javaee-samples-build (JavaEE6SDK)   1.0-4 known ----
javaee-samples-full (JavaEE6SDK)    1.0-4 known ----
javaee-samples-web (JavaEE6SDK)     1.0-4 known ----

Quick note - possible short outage on java.net

alexismp — Wed, 1 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

As we constantly improve the java.net infrastructure you might experience some downtime on Wed, Feb 1, 2012 @ 6-8pm PT. Hopefully, this one should only really be a short one.

Another look at GlassFish clustering and performance

alexismp — Wed, 1 Feb 2012 07:00:00 +0000

With this new "Glassfish – Vertical clustering with multiple domains" blog by Alexandru, there seems to be no shortage of GlassFish configuration posts.

Surely, that must say something about the popularity of GlassFish for highly-available apps.

While it uses mod_jk like most others, this one is multi-domain, uses JMS topics and spends some time looking at different JVM settings and their impact on response time and GC activity.

Transactional interceptors - request for feedback

alexismp — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:08:16 +0000

The Java EE 7 expert group has been defining transactional interceptors and there are a few issues it came across for which your developer feedback would be useful.

Bill Shannon has described the issues of :
• how to handle exceptions that are thrown out of a transactional method and
• how the new JTA transactional interceptor should interact with EJBs.
... and offers possible solutions.

If you care about these, please take a little bit of time to read through the above descriptions before you provide feedback. The best place for feedback would be the mailing list (subscription required first) but we'll also consider comments posted to this entry.

Java EE getting social with DaliCore

alexismp — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:54:00 +0000

DaliCore is a new project announced by Johan Vos on java.net to offer users and social networks on top of Java EE.

It is the open-sourcing of LodgON's technology developed for the past few years and used in a number of social websites.

You can think of this as twitter, Facebook, or social network-enabling your applications using Content, User, Group, and Authorization APIs. DaliCore is a logical extension to the the Java Enterprise specification (specifically to Java EE 6).

As with any Java.net project, you can start playing with the source code, engage on mailing lists, file bugs, but also get further details in this short presentation.

Good luck to Johan and team on this project!

More Java EE 7 - JSF 2.2

alexismp — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 02:00:00 +0000

JSF 2.2 (JSR 344) is yet another specification that's being worked on as part of the Java EE 7 effort and Arjan over at jdevelopment.nl has a detailed status covering everything new in this version of the spec.

Part of the features discussed in this blog post are a new queue control for AJAX requests, tighter CDI integration, some Java API additions as well as life-cycle events improvements.

It's great to see community members help spread the word on the progress made and as Ed Burns, the JSF spec lead, says - "(this is) a true testament to the value of transparency."

Tab Sweep - GlassFish patch, is PaaS Middleware over IaaS, NetBeans tips, JCP updates, ...

alexismp — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 07:00:00 +0000

Note: if you're reading this using a feedreader, please make sure you've updated to the updated TheAquarium feed.

Recent Tips and News on Java, Java EE 6, GlassFish & more :

• GlassFish Enterprise Server v2.1.1 Patch 15 (GlassFish for Business)
• PaaS is not Middleware over IaaS (Reza)
• Sneak peak at Java EE 7 - Multitenant Examples with EclipseLink (Markus)
• Building and testing ADF applications with Maven, JSFUnit, Arquillian and Embedded GlassFish (Dablomatique)
• NetBeans 7.1 IDE: Shelve and Un-Shelve Changes (John)
• NetBeans 7.1 IDE: Inspect and Transform to JDK 7 (John)
• JUG Leaders Conference (The Java blog)
• New JSR now open for review (The JCP blog)
• JCP EC Updates (The JCP blog)

What's up with EclipseLink?

alexismp — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 07:00:00 +0000

EclipseLink's Shaun Smith has recently been delivering a number of presentations on the status and future of the open source project. If you're curious about where innovative JPA projects are going, then you should check out this slide deck from Shaun.

Here are the main themes covered:

• REST: integration with JAX-RS to access relational data through REST with HTML 5 as the primary client with possibly JPA entities and persistence units defined via metadata with dynamic provisioning (i.e. no Java coding required).
• EclipseLink NoSQL: annotations (@NoSql) and XML to identify NoSQL stored entities with initial support for MongoDB and Oracle NoSQL.
• Multitenancy: already present in the shipping version of EclipseLink using the @Multitenant annotation and supporting different topologies with dedicated or shared application and/or database.

Next stop: EclipseLink 2.4 along with the June Juno Eclipse Release.

JCP.next with merged Executive Committee - JSR 355

alexismp — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 07:00:00 +0000

The latest JSR filed is #355 and it's not a technical one - "JCP Executive Committee Merge". As the name implies this is about merging the current ME and SE/EE executive committees into a unified one.

If you've been following carefully the changes planned for the JCP, the 2-step process turned into a 3-step evolution:
1/ JSR 348, JCP transparency
2/ Merging the two existing Executive Committees
3/ Sorting out the more complicated legal issues

If you're curious about the role of the executive committee members, check out this page on JCP.org. Hint: voting on JSRs is part of it, but there's more. The JSR Review Ballot starts on February 7th.

Upcoming JavaOne conferences. Around the World.

alexismp — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:00:00 +0000

Building on the successful Java One San Francisco and Latin America editions in 2011, the conference is on the road to three international destinations : Tokyo, Moscow and Hyderabad. Here are the details :

JavaOne Tokyo (Japan)
Date: April 4-5, 2012
Location: Academy Hills 49F, Roppongi Tokyo
Event Web site : Japanese | English

JavaOne Moscow (Russia)
Date: April 17-18, 2012
Location: Crocus Expo, International Exhibition Center

JavaOne Hyderabad (India)
Date: May 3-4, 2012
Location: Hyderabad International Convention Center

We're looking forward to meeting you at one of those events to chat anything Java EE and GlassFish!
By the way, the dates for JavaOne 2012 San Francisco are September 30th - October 4th and registration is open already.

Help shape the future of GlassFish (we're hiring)!

alexismp — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 07:00:00 +0000

The team is looking for talent to help build the future of our application server. If you are interested, check out this job posting. Here's an extract :

"Technical lead, design and develop features to manage the configuration of clustered, highly available deployments in elastic cloud environments that delivers massive scalability."

This is a job based in the US to work on the admin infrastructure, including on PaaS features.

New in JPA 2.1 Early Draft

alexismp — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:17:00 +0000

Java EE 7 is moving along nicely at the speed of its various JSRs and Arun has a rundown of the new features planned for JPA 2.1 as described in the recent Early Draft document.

The blog entry covers Stored Procedures (similar to named queries, defined on the entities themselves), bulk operations, new FUNCTION, ON, TREAT JPQL keywords, more alignment with CDI and unsynchronized persistence context.

There are more features planned for JPA 2.1 that didn't get in the early draft (such as multi-tenancy). As a reminder, EclipseLink is the reference implementation (RI) for this specification while GlassFish 4.0 will deliver the overal Java EE 7 RI.

Java EE 7 progress - CDI 1.1 EDR and Weld 2.0 Alpha

alexismp — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Having the Early Draft Review of JSR 346 (CDI 1.1) available for review and studying is good but having an early implementation to go along is even better.

That's what JBoss' Jozef Hartinger has recently announced on his blog - an alpha release of the future Weld 2.0 reference implementation.

According to Jozef, the main purpose of this release is in fact to provide a feature-complete implementation of this draft CDI specification and features such as CDI.current(), application life-cycle qualifiers, beans.xml manipulation using ProcessModule, and many others.

As a reminder CDI 1.1 is scheduled to be integrated in the upcoming Java EE 7 platform later this year.

Admin Console, Community and Virtuous Circle

alexismp — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Note: if you're reading this using a feedreader, please make sure you've updated to the updated TheAquarium feed.

We haven't really covered this before, but there's been quite a bit of work on the admin console in the upcoming GlassFish 3.1.2 release (in addition to the other new features and theme and updated components).

Specifically in this release, the team worked on the following :

• Performance startup (better figures by default and conditional automated console initialization).
• Feature parity with CLI in the areas of Secure Admin config, JMS Cluster configuration, Monitoring Data consolidation, new Http Listeners page (à la GlassFish v2), listing EJB timers.
• Support for new product features such as DCOM cluster nodes.
• Ability to collect domain instance logs.
• More tests.

The best part about these improvements? There's almost all entirely driven by your feedback! So thank you to everyone that took time to help us understand how to make GlassFish a better product via bug reports, requests for enhancements and even phone calls in some cases. Let's keep doing this!

The GlassFish Web Console started off back in 2006 as the killer feature, especially compared to other open source offerings. With continued enhancements I think it still has a clear edge on them and longer-term plans shouldn't prove me wrong!

Tab Sweep - GlassFish encoding, REST from NSA, OpenJDK on Mac progress, coding guidelines, Oracle ecosystem, ...

alexismp — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Note: if you're reading this using a feedreader, please make sure you've updated to the updated TheAquarium feed.

Recent Tips and News on Java, Java EE 6, GlassFish & more :

• Mac OS X Port Project Status (OpenJDK Wiki)
• Customize container-managed security with AuthenticRoast
(IBM developerWorks, uses GlassFish)
• Guidelines for Implementation of REST (nsa, yes that NSA)
• GlassFish Default Encoding ISO-8859-1 (John)
• The CERT Oracle Secure Coding Standard for Java (cert.org)
• Hoe to package @Local interfaces in an ear (Adam)
• The Java Fluent API Designer Crash Course
• Oracle and the Java Ecosystem (InfoQ)
• Greg Luck and the return of JSR 107 (H-Online)
• David Blevins discusses TomEE and JavaEE containers (YouTube)
• How to fix the Glassfish GA 3.1.1 pkg error on Fedora 10 x86_64 (William)
• DOAG@Talk: Ed Burns talks about (...) JSF and ADF (YouTube)
• First Hudson Release from Eclipse Foundation (HudsonCentral)

GlassFish as one of top 2011 open source projects

alexismp — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Note: if you're reading this using a feedreader, please make sure you've updated to the updated TheAquarium feed.

Late last week, this article over at eWeek enumerated the Top 16 Open-Source Projects in 2011 with GlassFish making the list.

The list was put together by OpenLogic using a methodology based on eight metrics that include public data, as well as aggregated data from their tools and customer base.

GlassFish was listed as infrastructure in enterprise applications, in the "Web and application servers" category. Other winners include HBase, Hadoop, and MongoDB.

Jelastic now taking full advantage of GlassFish clustering

alexismp — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Note: if you're reading this using a feedreader, please make sure you've updated to the updated TheAquarium feed.

Jelastic has been a popular multi-container PaaS solution for Java developments offering support for GlassFish among other container choices.

It now fully supports the GlassFish 3.1.x clustering DAS-based architecture with horizontal scaling and session replication, both of which leverage Jelastic's NGINX-based load-balancing service.

Have you tried GlassFish running on Jelastic? What was the experience like?

Java EE testing with GlassFish and modern frameworks

alexismp — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Note: if you're reading this using a feedreader, please make sure you've updated to the updated TheAquarium feed.

Integration testing of Java EE developments is an important topic both Markus Eisele and Antonio Goncalves have recently covered in respective blogs.

Both use GlassFish and Arquillian while Antonio shows different testing approaches and also throws Mockito into the mix.

On the same topic, I'd recommend reading Adam Bien's OTN article from last September and if you can read French, you might also find this JavaEE Testing presentation of interest.

Tab Sweep - Proxying, Mobile JSF, verbose Java, performance book, Java actors, etc.

alexismp — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Recent Tips and News on Java, Java EE 6, GlassFish & more :

• Using Apache mod_proxy with GlassFish and Mercurial (John)
• Create Mobile Websites using JSF and PrimeFaces Mobile (Micha)
• PaaS a Java EE 6 Application (presentation) (Kshitiz @ IndicThreads)
• Languages, Verbosity, and Java (InformIT)
• Introducing Seren, the serialization speed enhancer (Olivier)
• Comparing Heap Dumps with NetBeans 7.1 (Dustin)
• Java Performance (Book Review) (Dzone)
• Actors in Java (Fabrizio)
• Standard JSON API for Java to be developed (h-online)
• OpenJDK Community TCK License for Java SE 7 Available (Donald)
• Async HTTP Client 1.7.0 has been released (Jean-François)