Blogging Roller

It's time to catch up on blogging and I'm going to start by going through my backlog of links and adding some commentary, but not in this post; these are miscellaneous links that don't fit nicely into my other posts.

• Slashdot | Why Google Should Embrace OpenOffice.org
  "If Google really wanted to deliver a knockout punch to Microsoft, it would integrate OpenOffice with Google Docs" -- and pump some money into OOo development
• Headius: The Power of the JVM
  "And while JRuby and Groovy will probably spend the next few months one-upping each other, we've both proven something far more important: the JVM is an *excellent* platform for dynamic languages. Don't let anyone tell you it's not."
• SpringSource Blog - Open Source, Open Strategy
  My 141 char summary: open source good, but we need money. we won't relicense existing parts, but we'll GPL the full-stack so we alone can ride it to the bank
• Kohsuke Kawaguchi: GlassFish v3 just got embeddable
  "GlassFish glassfish = new GlassFish(); glassfish.minimallyConfigure(8080);"
• Derby: Using the bulk import and export procedures
  closest thing to mysqldump in Derby land
• Core team statement on replication in PostgreSQL
  "it is time to include a simple, reliable basic replication feature in the core system"
• Distributed Caching with Memcached
  Nice how-it-works article on memcached.

I'm supposed to be on vacation today and I'm doing my best, but I just wanted to point out that something interesting has quietly appeared in the Glassfish Update Center. Why so quiet? Well, it's an EA2 release and the emphasis is definitely on the E. I'll post some more details later, perhaps after winter break. I've still got shopping to do now and I'm supposed to be on vacation.

Interested? If you haven't done so already grab yourself a copy of the new Glassfish V2 UR1 release. Run the updatetool and install the latest EA2 release of Social Software for GlassFish.

See also: Something fishy.

• Sound Opinions from Chicago Public Radio and American Public Media
  Best podcast ever


• The Aquarium: GlassFish Interim Governance Board - Now Complete
  "The complete roster is Tony, Greg Luck (Wotif.com) and Pierre Delisle (Google), and Simon and myself (Sun)"
• Bistro!: GlassFish/SJS AS in production - which bundle, which profile, ...?
  Explains differences between developer, cluster and enterprise profiles
• GlassFish Podcast: The GlassFish Podcast
  Finally, a Glassfish podcast! Props to Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine
• Apple - Downloads - UNIX & Open Source - GlassFish
  Download Glassfish V2 directly from Apple
• Red Hat and Sun Collaborate to Advance Open Source Java Technology
  "Red Hat has signed Sun's broad contributor agreement that covers participation in all Sun-led open source projects."


• Megginson: First looks at OpenSocial: part 1 (URLs)
  Lists the URIs for the AtomPub collections available in OpenSocial
• Megginson: First looks at OpenSocial: part 2 (members and friends)
  How OpenSocial members and friends are represented in Atom format
• Megginson: First looks at OpenSocial: part 3 (activities)
  How OpenSocial activities are represented in Atom format and manipulated via AtomPub protocol
• Megginson: First looks at OpenSocial: part 4 (persistence data)
  How OpenSocial persistence is implemented via AtomPub protocol
• Google: OpenSocial Container Sample
  Shows "basic demonstration-level OpenSocial container can be implemented"
• Dare Obasanjo: OpenSocial Tech. Overview and Critique
  "Despite these misgivings, I think this is a step in the right direction. Web widget and social graph APIs need to be standardized across the Web."


• snellspace.com: Notes, Part 2
  "lots and lots of things that can be modeled as collections of web resources"
• netzooid: Building Services with AtomPub
  "While APP is not the one true protocol, I think I?m hooked"

Yes this is my obligatory Glassfish V2 post but listen, for me V2 is a pretty big big deal. Like Eclipse, which was the IDE that pulled me away from VIM, Glassfish V2 is the app server that finally pulled me away from Tomcat.

You see, I've been using Tomcat every day for a very long time. I started back in 2000 when I worked at HAHT Software and I was working on the new "Rocketsled" J2EE version of the HAHTsite app server. We were ripping out the old proprietary page engine and plugging in Tomcat. It was a pleasure to work with and I learned a hell of a lot from the code-base. After joining Sun and switching from Eclipse to Netbeans because Sun-on-Sun matters, I still stuck with Tomcat. It's what we were using for blogs.sun.com and Glassfish was just too bulky and slow. I grew to love Netbeans, but I couldn't stomach Glassfish, until now.

Now that Glassfish V2 is out I'm switching from Tomcat to Glassfish for all of my development. It's more than fast enough. With Glassfish on my MacBook Pro, Roller restart time is about 8 seconds compared to 16 with Tomcat. And the quality is high; the admin console, the asadmin command-line utility and the docs are all excellent. The dog food is surprisingly tasty ;-)

Congrats to the Glassfish team!

Via the Aquarium, there's a nice Java EE and Glassfish adoption story over in Chillboro:

Adam Constabaris: A fundamental question for us in building this application was whether to use Tomcat and "soup it up" by using Spring to add services Tomcat doesn't provide itself, or whether to use a full Java EE container. We could have made it work with the servlet container approach, since our application isn't heavily "enterprisey" and we were initially reluctant to pay the complexity price of EJBs. After looking at the Java EE 5 specification, though, we saw a lot of ways we could simplify and standardize things, such as using JSF 1.2 and coding to the Java Persistence API rather than using Hiberrnate APIs directly.

Hey! I know that guy. Hi Adam.

Is there a trend towards full app servers and away from plain old Tomcat? Is it because of strong open source Java EE offerings from Sun, JBoss and Apache? I don't know, but I sure hope so.