"SAN FRANCISCO (11/06/2008) - Sun is offering on Thursday its open-source GlassFish Enterprise Server version 3 Prelude, a Web application server based on a modular OSGi architecture with capabilities from the planned Java Platform EE (Enterprise Edition) 6 release."
"The GlassFish V2 beta incorporates enterprise functionality from Sun's commercially supported Java System Application Server Enterprise Edition, including clustering, administration, and load balancing. Also highlighted is the inclusion of Web Services Interoperability Technology, for linkage between Web services hosted on Java and Microsoft Windows environments."
"Drachnik is the community development and marketing manager for the Open Source Group at Sun. GlassFish is the open-source project built around Java Enterprise Edition, version 5, which develops software applications targeted at businesses. In an interview with IDG News Service at JavaOne 2007 in San Francisco, Drachnik discussed how GlassFish works and how interest in it has grown. An edited transcript of the interview follows:"
"David Heffelfinger has been developing software professionally since 1995; he has been using Java as his primary programming language since 1996. He has worked on many large-scale projects for several clients including Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and the US Department of Defense. He has a Masters degree in Software Engineering from Southern Methodist University. David is editor in chief of Ensode.net, a website about Java, Linux, and other technology topics."
"The GlassFish application server provides good facilities for cluster management and load balancing. Still, sometimes we need to have more fine-grained control over how our cluster nodes are loaded with requests. One such condition can happen in a shared environment when we are using the processing power to host several applications, ranging from databases to batch job processing to application servers serving requests that come from different customers. Such conditions can lead us to change the load routed toward each GlassFish instance during different time slices. We can change the routed load manually, but having the ability to change it automatically based on defined rules is something very desirable."
"This article outlines details of messaging in general and enterprise messaging in particular using JMS and Message-Driven Beans (MDB). The messaging capabilities of the GlassFish application server as well as its configuration setup are covered in this article. In order to better explain these technologies, a simple yet realtime use case and its implementation details are also discussed here."
"The Long Running Web Process (LRWP) is a protocol used by a web server to communicate with its peers. LRWP is similar to CGI, but faster, since the peer is persistent across requests. In LRWP, a TCP connection is established between the LRWP peer and a LRWP agent. The LRWP agent could be the web container or a process running within the web container and the LRWP peer could be any process running on a network. The LRWP peer at connection registers the web context that the peer is interested in. The web context could be any context, such as "/osp", "/tep", or "/cgi-bin" itself. When a request for that context is made, the agent transfers the input to the LRWP peer and sends the output from the peer back to the web client. The LRWP agent should also be able to support multiple peers concurrently, and each peer makes a connection and registers the context it is interested in."
"As soon as you deploy an EAR that contains an application client, the GlassFish app server supports Java Web Start access to it, provided that the developer did not specify <eligible>false</eligible> in the application client's sun-application-client.xml descriptor file. As an administrator you do not need to take any additional steps to allow end users to launch application clients using Java Web Start technology."
"But with the availability of GlassFish v2 , companies now have an application server that is open source and has the characteristics needed to handle business-critical applications and the rigors of production environments. Companies no longer have to choose between an open-source application server and a robust, reliable, enterprise-ready application server. They can have both with GlassFish v2."
"You might be one of those participants. If not, you might know something about GlassFish and might like to learn more. Or perhaps this is the first you've heard of GlassFish. In either case, this brief article is for you. It describes what GlassFish is and why it's important, it points to where you can get more information, and it shows you how to get involved -- or even more involved than you are now."
"The evolution of Web technologies in Java technology has greatly benefited developers over the years. The latest evolution, the unified expression language, promises to further benefit developers by allowing them to mix both JSTL and JSF technologies. The unified expression language is now an important part of the Java EE 5 specification, which makes it an important part of Geronimo 2.0. Geronimo has once again helped developers by not only implementing the spec, but by using the reference implementation of the spec. With GlassFish JSTL and Geronimo 2.0, developers have more choices than ever when building Java Web applications."
