Today is Nov 21th, 2009. News shorts of interest to our communities, including: New date for EU review of Oracle/Sun acquisition, getting closer to v3 fcs, new OpenESB and OpenDS releases, Devoxx whiteboards, new customers and japanese event, and more.

Waiting for Godot
I read Waiting for Godot for HS, but I didn't expect to live it...

• E.U. Takes More Time to Review Oracle-Sun Deal

On the Road to GlassFish v3
We are getting very close. The buzz around JavaEE 6 and GFv3 at #devoxx was very positive; some more links:

• Migrating your Apps to JavaEE 6 (Wouter van Reeven)
• Adam Bien on
  • Adoption of EJB and JavaEE, Ready for Production and ... (it is) a massive rewrite.
  • Also see Adam's JavaEE Patterns and Best Practices @ Kenai, all based on GF.

New Releases
Final and Release Candidates releases:

• OpenDS 2.2.0 Release Candidate 3 is now available
• DSEE 7 Download, Documentation and Upgrade Guide Available Today
• JavaCAPS 6.2 is now available (ontherecord, webpage) - Based on GlassFish 2.1p2 and OpenESB 2.1
• Fuji (OpenESB v3) Milestone 9 is now available - (Mark's note, Wiki page).

More Devoxx
Devoxx is over.  By all accounts, a successful show.

• Devoxx 2009 picassa album... with
  • Whiteboard pics - JVM, CI Tool, Persistence Layer, Build Tool, UI Framework
  • Hudson #1 in CI (113); next are TeamCity (31) and CruiseControl (30).
• Notes on Mark's jigsaw prezo (from Reinier Zwitserloot)

GlassFish Customers and Events
New customers; new events

• Mapion Co. Ltd, in Japan (chhandomay, customers) - Using GlassFish Enterprise Server, MySQL Cluster and more.
• Health Sciences South Carolina (ontherecord) - Using JavaCAPS 6 including GlassFish ESB, MDM, HL7, LifeRay and more.
• New event: Benefits of GlassFish and MySQL in Japanese (Dec 9th, 2009).  All events at GF Event Calendar.

Other News

• ICEfaces 2.0 is now available for download.
• State of OpenSource AppServers by Masoud Kalali
• The LHC is back online! (website, #LHC)

A new Eclipse proposal (Eclipse Development Process: Pre-Proposal and Proposal) has just been posted at Eclipse.org.

Quoting from the proposal, the scope of the Gemini project is two-fold: • Integration of existing Java enterprise technologies into module-based platforms; and • Implementation of enterprise specifications for module-based platforms The initial emphasis is on standards developed by the OSGi Enterprise Expert Group. Gemini is organized under 6 subprojects, each seeded with contributions from SpringSource or Oracle and the overall lead for the project is Mike Keith. The project mentors are Wayne Beaton, Doug Clarke and Adrian Colyer.

A summary of today's news of interest to our communities. Today is Nov 19th, 2009. One more day to go at Devoxx, some Terracotta news and more GlassFish Events. The Java EE 6 specs are in voting right now, and we are still awaiting Godot. Note - this is an experiment to flush out the daily news that otherwise we can't cover due to limited time. Let us know how the format works for you.

Terracotta News

Bumped into Alex Miller's blog and it has several posts worth mentioning:

• Terracotta Acquires Quartz
• Terracotta, Ehcache, Hibernate, and more to come
• Terracotta Use Cases

Devoxx Updates

• Closures coming to JDK 7 - Samples from Cay;reactions from AlexM and StephenC.
• JDK 7 schedule extended til Sept 2010.
• Jigsaw downloads available
  • And, from last week see JDK 7 M5 and companion NB 6.8
• Hudson, the most used CI Solution at Devoxx (@rob2)
• Photos (from Picassa Album)- Happy faces: Roberto; Antonio and AlexisMP - one, two; Ludo.
• Danny's summaries on Day 1 and Day 2. Many, many tweets at #devoxx.

New GlassFish Events

• Added JSF Summit, Sao Paolo Tech Days and JSF Days 2010 to the GF Event Calendar.

As Christoph Noack opened a time capsule, let me do the same. Mine goes back 2 months to Sept 17/18/19 when specially invited members of the German-language OpenOffice.org community came to Hamburg. The visitors pictured above, plus me and Marcus Lange from Sun who joined the photo, were (l to r): Marcus Lange, Florian Effenberger, Daniel Stoni, Christian Lohmaier, Elizabeth Matthis (aka Liz), Thomas Hackert Uwe Altmann (not pictured: Gerald Geib, Volker Merschmann)

It was so wonderful to meet face to face people otherwise only known from email and to be able to thank them for their dedication and support. They each traveled here at their own cost (from far corners of Germany and even from Switzerland), which further shows their enthusiasm and dedication to our thriving open source product. On Thursday evening, those who were already in Hamburg met at a pub (Max&Consorten) for a first get-together. Afterward, most of us concluded the evening with a round of beers and more talk at my home---which I jokingly called "Motel Matthis".

Friday started out with a heartfelt word of welcome and thanks from Michael Bemmer, Senior Director of StarOffice/OpenOffice.org Engineering, and unfolded with a series of talks and snacks, including lunch and several smaller group meetings about special topics, until concluding at approximately 5:30 PM.

There were entertaining and informative talks by Stefan Taxhet on OOo in general, Gerd Weiss on infrastructure---including a personal tour of the server rooms to underline some of his points about the hardware, Andreas Bartel on Renaissance and Uwe Fischer on documentation, as well as tours of the engineering facility and opportunities to say hello to many of the OOo developers in real life.

At the end of the very busy but fun day, those of us who still had time went out to eat together at an Italian restaurant (maybe this was to get in the mood for the OOoCon in Italy!) and, several courageous visitors even spent a second night at Motel Matthis! This time Uwe made sure we had enough beer to let us talk long into the night. Thanks, Uwe!

Some comments I received after the visit are:

thackert: "It was interesting to become acquainted with some people I'd only known the mail address or nick of, and to hear really interesting talks as well to "sightsee" SUN. All in all a nice trip and - the best of all - a really nice stay at "Motel Matthis" with a perfect hostess (Liz!)"

floeff: "Thank you very much to everyone who made this visit in Hamburg possible! I'd never been at Sun Hamburg before, and it was a really nice day meeting old and new friends, getting insight on how the OpenOffice.org development works, and after all, we also had a lot of fun and a real great time. Liz is a wonderful hostess and we all enjoyed some very special days in a community that more and more becomes a real family."

VolkerMe: "Thank you again for such a nice day, which was very much too short for me. The opportunity to have personal talks with the engineers at SUN was so interesting, I wasn't able to discuss everything, so I hope I can come back another time. And although it has been said so often: Thanks Liz for hosting the meeting, for the well-prepared accommodation and for being our always smiling guide!

Saturday came too quickly and I had to say goodbye to my delightful guests. I hope to organize another visit to thank additional and like-wise dedicated community members in 2010.

Kind regards,
Liz

Calling all GlassFish-related events!

We maintain a master calendar for events related to all the projects in GlassFish Portfolio at Google Calendar; if you are hosting such an event, or presenting at one, please let us know to theaquarium at sun dot com.

The calendar ID is 3722ulvfgor2qabrut1mkia5m0@group.calendar.google.com, and you can access it in a number of modes: • RSS Feed • iCal Format • HTML

The current setup of websites for downloading OpenOffice.org installation sets provides builds for several languages and operating systems. But nowadays a lot more are built. Unfortunately they are not that easy to find as they are on mirror servers. The most users do not know this or how to come to these mirrors.

Furthermore there was no comfortable way to download language packs (currently for 96 languages !).

Another reason is that many native language teams have only a small staff or do not have the time to test all available Release Candidate (RC) builds on all platforms for their language. However, these are very close to a final release but have not got the latest tests. But why not offering these to the users with a hint to be carefully when using?

To improve this situation and to deliver more choice we have created a new download website layout.

Main Download Page

http://download.openoffice.org

This website was enhanced to download easily the build you want. Of course the well-known (green) One-Click download remains the same easy way to get your favorite version. The same for the orange button for Developer Snapshots. The new thing is the yellow button that will guide you to the website for Release Candidates.

Full Installations and Language Packs

The improvements were done here to provide all available stable builds:

http://download.openoffice.org/other.html

The first table provides all full installation sets as stable release of the current OpenOffice.org version. The second table provides all stable language packs.

BTW:
A language pack contains only resource files for a specific language and platform to show, e.g., menus, dialogs and error messages in your language. If translated it may contain also the help content. It's a comfortable way to get several languages without to install the applications double and triple. After installation change the languages via menu "Tools - Options - Language Settings - Languages - User Interface".

Release Candidates

A complete new website was created to offer all Release Candidates. Also here the first table has links to the full installation sets and the second to all language packs:

http://download.openoffice.org/all_rc.html

Some days ago the 100 millionth download of an OpenOffice.org build was announced. We hope to increase this impressive number with the new download websites.

Happy downloading. :-)

Check out this photo of Steve Harris's keynote at Devoxx; Sparky has a new friend! Twitter is full of positive comments. I need to do a pass to separate the interesting ones, but raw data at: #glassFish OR glassfish, #JavaEE6, #glassfish and #Devoxx. Looking forward to a complete report from Alexis (this photo is from the standing-room only JavaEE 6 University talk that he and Antonio gave). PS. Thanks to whoever took Steve's photo. I'll add attribution as soon as I find the author Aaron Houston for Steve's photo.

Developer Snapshot build OOo-Dev OOO320_m5 which installs as OOo-DEV 3.2.0 has been uploaded.

If you find severe issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org's bug tracking system IssueTracker.

Please use the following link:
http://download.openoffice.org/next

Release Notes:
http://development.openoffice.org/releases/OOO320_m5_snapshot.html

MD5 checksums:
http://download.openoffice.org/next/md5sums/OOO320_m5_md5sums.txt

Developer Snapshot build OOo-Dev DEV300_m65 which installs as OOo-DEV 3.2 (subject to change) has been uploaded to the mirror network.

If you find severe issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org's bug tracking system IssueTracker.

Please use the following link:
http://download.openoffice.org/next

Packages are also available from extended mirror sites ( listed with an [E] ) from the ".../extended/developer/DEV300_m65" directory:
http://distribution.openoffice.org/mirrors/#extmirrors

Release Notes:
http://development.openoffice.org/releases/DEV300_m65_snapshot.html

MD5 checksums:
http://download.openoffice.org/next/md5sums/DEV300_m65_md5sums.txt

The adoption of Hudson continues to grow and we are also beginning to see movement in Sun's commercial offering.

Kohsuke's Hudson Feed has many examples of adoption. The community is very active and recent posts include A Campfire Plugin and a CMake Plugin, a spanish Tutorial on SVN and Hudson and Using Hudson with Rational Team Concert (from the official IBM site!). Two posts with nice, quotable compliments are:

• From Grant Smith's Creating a Continuous Integration Server for Java Projects Using Hudson at Wazi: our conclusion - based on a combination of first-hand experience and other people's opinions - is that Hudson is the current front-runner among open source CI engines. • From Joe Heck: Hudson - A lot of things done right: check out Hudson. It's a quick check - one download, one command-line, and you are rolling.

Three examples on the commercial side, all from today:

• We closed another customer for Sun's Hudson Support; nice! Just let us know if you have any questions.

• We also got email from one of Sun's Principal Field Engineers. He is overseas visiting a (very) large customer where he found wide use of Hudson and strong interest in improved support. We not even knew this company was using Hudson - strike another win for Open Source!

• And, our friends at Sun's Inner Circle - Sun's newsletter for CIOs - included an article on Hudson in the Nov/Dec issue.

The last batch of JSR's for JavaEE 6 were submitted earlier this week for Final Approval Ballot . The ballot will start on 11/17/09 and end on 11/30/09. They are:

• JSR 316 - JavaTM Platform, Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6) Specification • JSR 315 - JavaTM Servlet 3.0 Specification • JSR 317 - JavaTM Persistence 2.0 • JSR 318 - Enterprise JavaBeansTM 3.1 • JSR 322 - JavaTM EE Connector Architecture 1.6 • JSR-299 - Web Beans (now called CDI)

Several JSRs had been submitted and approved previously:

• JSR 314 - JavaServer Faces 2.0 (News@TA, vote results: 12 YES/4 Not voted)
• JSR 330 - Dependency Injection for Java  (News@TA, vote results: 14 Yes/1 No/1 Not voted)
• JSR 303 - Bean Validation (Emmanuel's note, vote results: 12 Yes/4 Not voted)

A few of the specs went through the lighter-weight Maintenance Process, including:

• JSR 311 - JAX-RS: The Java^TM API for RESTful Web Services JAX-RS 1.1 (Paul's note, change log)

Some images from the Tokyo Linux User Group technical meeting and nomikai tonight.

Many more TLUG photos here.

GlassFish v3 is not just modular but the components can be updated through IPS-based UpdateCenter machinery. The Update Center team has been evolving tracking the IPS changes and adding refinements of their own; newer releases, like GFv3Preview, have been running recent UC, but the repositories for GFv3Prelude were running an older version of UC. Last week the Glassfish team pushed Update Center Toolkit 2.2u2 to the Prelude repositories. In normal conditions you should not notice the change but if you visit the repository directly you will see new graphics and additional facilities (like package search) plus improved performance and metrics.

GFv3 FCS is around the corner and we are seeing very high interest in the release. At that point we expect the bulk of the GlassFish downloads to switch to being served from the IPS repositories - and we will find out if our capacity planning has been accurate :-)

I spoke this morning at the South Tyrol Free Software Conference in Bolzano, Italy. My subject was the idea of a "software freedom scorecard", a list of indicators for the strength of software freedom in an open source project or product, about which I wrote recently. The slides are available for download.

I also refer to reptiles, and that's a reference to another blog post.

Do not miss your opportunity to enter Christoph's time machine, if you could not attend this years OOoCon in Orvieto. Even if you have attended, it gives you the possibility to see the conference from a non-developers point of view. Enjoy!

Best regards,

Frank

Migration time! OpenSolaris, NetBeans and Hudson have moved (part of) their infrastructure.

The OpenSolaris Website Community migrated opensolaris.org from an ad-hoc web app to XWiki on October 26th, 2009 completing phase 2 of the OpenSolaris.org transition. Check the Transition FAQ for more details. This move had been in the planning for a long time and is still unfolding. The NetBeans site moved the week of Nov 2dn to a new site, see the Announcement and the FAQ. The new NB site uses the Kenai infrastructure but is its own instance, separate from that of Kenai.org. I believe this move has completed.

The last (ongoing) move is for Hudson. Most of Hudson was at Java.Net but some parts were not - like the confluence-based wiki. After the availability problems from a couple of months ago, Kohsuke and the community decided to move the bulk to Kenai. That move is still ongoing but some key sections, like the front-page, have already moved.

In all cases, these moves are intended to be (mostly) transparent to the users (hopefully with improved QoS).

New-style service constructors in OpenOffice.org Basic

Starting with OpenOffice.org 3.2 OpenOffice.org Basic allows to use UNO new-style service constructors (for more details please see http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/DevGuide/ProUNO/Services).

To achieve this UNO services are now mapped to OpenOffice.org Basic objects. They have to be addressed by using the complete UNO namespace path. Let's take the example from the "Service Constructors" section in the wiki page mentioned above completed by a dummy module:

module com { module sun { module star { module foo {

service SomeService: XSomeInterface {

create1();

create2([in] long arg1, [in] string arg2);

create3([in] any... rest);

};

}; }; }; };

Then the service object can be addressed like this:

Dim oSomeServiceObj

oSomeServiceObj = com.sun.star.foo.SomeService

All constructors defined for a new-style service are available as methods of its corresponding OpenOffice.org Basic object, e.g.:

Dim oSomeInstance As Object

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create1()

' or

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create2( 42, "Hello" )

' or

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create3( aVarOfAnyType )

Internally the parameters are passed to the createInstanceWithArgumentsAndContext method of com.sun.star.lang.XMultiComponentFactory as Arguments sequence. The UNO default context is used both to obtain the Multi Component Factory and as Context parameter.

This is the simple version. To give more control to the user there's also another way to call service constructors similar to the one used in the C++ mapping of service constructors. In this version the UNO context can be passed explicitly to the constructor method. Then the code would look like this:

Dim oMyContext As Object

oMyContext = GetContextFromSomewhere()

Dim oSomeInstance As Object

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create1( oMyContext )

' or

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create2( oMyContext, 42, "Hello" )

' or

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create3( oMyContext, aVarOfAnyType )

In this case the passed context is used internally instead of the UNO default context.

The OpenOffice.org Basic runtime automatically chooses the appropriate version by checking the first parameter's type. If the first parameter supports com.sun.star.uno.XComponentContext and the parameter count exceeds the one of the used constructor the second version is used.

This can become a problem in one special case: If a constructor has a rest parameter and expects an object supporting XComponentContext as argument it becomes ambiguous which version should be used. It could be a call to the constructor with the intention to pass the context as an argument to the service (case 1) or with the intention to pass the context to createInstanceWithArgumentsAndContext with no argument for the service (case 2).

The solution: In case 1 it doesn't matter if no or one context is passed as parameter:

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create3()

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create3( oMyContext )

oMyContext is only used for createInstanceWithArgumentsAndContext and not passed as argument to the service.

For case 2 the context has to be passed twice

oSomeInstance = oSomeServiceObj.create3( oMyContext, oMyContext )

Then the second context parameter is passed to the service. This may look a little bit strange, but it's a rather exotic scenario anyway.

If a new-style service only has an implicit constructor it's mapped to a method "create" without parameters in OpenOffice.org Basic.

Vincent Spiewak has finished his OpenOffice.org extension for converting ODF text documents to DAISY Digital Talking Books - you can find the press release here.

The extension not only creates XML content, but also can make use of different text to speech engines, so you will have fully featured talking books.

I recommend this extension for everybody who wants to create DAISY books. Binaries and source files are available on sourceforge, the license is LGPL 3.

If you never heard of DAISY before, you might want to look at the screen casts which will show you how it works.

Thank you very much for this great OpenOffice.org extension!

3 seats on the OpenOffice.org Community Council are to be taken by community members to represent their constituency. After the nomination and introduction period now the 3 elections are open.

Code Contributor Representative: candidate Jürgen Schmidt seeks the support of code contributors.

Product Development Representative: candidates Christoph Noack and Alexandro Colorado strive for the majority of votes from leads of accepted projects and incubator projects.

Native Language Representative: candidate Charles-H. Schulz seeks the support of leads of native language projects.

If you are a member of one of the above mentioned constituencies you will have received an email that invites you to participate. Please cast your vote until November 16.

It looks a bit complicated but there are descriptions available about the OpenOffice.org Community Council, its charter, the election process and the candidates for the November 2009 elections.

Thanks go to the helping hands running the elections as commissary (Louis, louis@ooo) and observers (Mechtilde, mechtilde@ooo; Sophie, sgauti@ooo).

PS: If you think you should have received an invitation please drop me, the commissary and observers a note (after a look in your spam folder ;-).

As promised the results of automated tests for release workspace OOO320 starting minor m3 to m4. Explanation of testresults from OOO320m1 to OOO320m2 can be found here. As expected in previous blog the m3 had a green state as all features covered by automated tests had no issue. But unfortunately Issue 106678 put a spoke on our wheel and shredded all results in OOO320m4. Thats why this high number of errors and warnings made this build from our point of view useless. The reason why this issue wasn't found by automated tests in CWS impress180 is currently unknown. However see the graph on quality progress:

This week carries a new episode in the Sun/Oracle/EU saga: The EU Comission has issued a statement of objections on the acquisition of Sun by Oracle.

Since I am a Sun employee, I will just provide the basic links, no matter how tempting it might be to go beyond that... • (Nov 9th) EU issues SoO - I've only found indirect references to the SoO, like Sun's K-8 Filing. • (later that same day...) Oracle reacted with a PR Statement. • (a bit later...) The DOJ issued their own comment on the EU SoO. • (next morming, Nov 10th) And the EU comments on the DOJ comment (Reuters) • (and, on Nov 11th) According to eWeek Europe, the next step is a hearing on Nov 25th.

The material would make for good pulp fiction. It's very sad to see the impact on people, but today I was talking with a friend that was affected and he was being very good at keeping things in perspective, so I thought of using the front cover of a true pulp fiction: Doc Savage - which I first encountered in an old Spanish translation in a storage room in my grandfather's flat in Barcelona (together with copies of The Shadow and El Coyote).

Perhaps also time to watch again the movie? Blu-ray, pretty please?

The milestone had already been uploaded last week at the OpenOffice.org conference in Orvieto (Italy), but conference activities distracted me from announcing the release officially on the list.

Now you may find the ODFDOM packages of binaries and JavaDoc at ODFDOM's download section. Detailed release notes have been added to the Wiki.

My thanks to the ODFDOM developer community, especially IBM's team for their assistance to make this release possible!

To me the best news from last week's conference is the rising interest from other ODF development teams. Last week in Orvieto the teams of lpOD and ODFKIT showed interest in joining our efforts in a concept of a cross language ODF API such as ODFDOM.
Their programming language of choice will be Python (lpOD) and C++ (ODFKIT). In addition the chair of AODL (another ODF Toolkit Union project) gave signs of interest in joining an aligned approach.

The next major release (version 0.8) of ODFDOM (Java) is planned for the end of January 2010.
This release should roll out the design we already have in our minds, but which has not been integrated to our implementation so far.
Aside of improvements of design, there will be enhancements of our convenience functionality for instance the 'Navigation API' (currently delivered with an incubator status). The purpose of the 'Navigation API' is to be able to find elements and text, based on search criteria (e.g. regular expressions).

For a complete list of possible upcoming changes, please take a look at our task list.

For joining the project pick a task or contact us on the project's developer mailing list.

Looking forward to continuing our important work!
Svante

Developer Snapshot build OOo-Dev DEV300_m64 which installs as OOo-DEV 3.2 (subject to change) has been uploaded to the mirror network.

If you find severe issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org's bug tracking system IssueTracker.

Please use the following link:
http://download.openoffice.org/next

Packages are also available from extended mirror sites ( listed with an [E] ) from the ".../extended/developer/DEV300_m64" directory:
http://distribution.openoffice.org/mirrors/#extmirrors

Release Notes:
http://development.openoffice.org/releases/DEV300_m64_snapshot.html

MD5 checksums:
http://download.openoffice.org/next/md5sums/DEV300_m64_md5sums.txt

Some words regarding the QA Camp last Thursday at the OpenOffice.org Conference in Orvieto, Italy:

Last Thursday many interested people met in Orvieto to talk about QA related topics. People came from all around the world.

Just to mention some of them:

Takamichi Akyiama [known as Tora] (OOo, Japan)
Shinji Enoki (OOo, Japan)
Makoto Takizawa (OOo, Japan)
André Schnabel (OOo, Germany)
Jaqueline Rahemipour (OOo, Germany)
Sophie Gautier (OOo, France)
Goran Rakic (OOo, Serbia)
Rudolf Ferenc (University of Szeged, Hungary)
Doug Bash (Seattle, USA)
Uwe Luebbers (Sun, Hamburg, Germany)

We talked about:

Quaste (a web application to compare VCL Testtool results),
QA-Track (a web application to register the release status of released builds),
Convwatch (a tool that can compare the document layout of different OOo versions via bitmap subtraction), about API/unit tests, about Automation by using the VCL Testtool, about TCM (a web application to store localized versions of test cases), about TCS (test case specifications), about the need of manual tests with input method editors (IME), about iTeams (Jaqueline talked about her experience with working together with Writer developers on a rework of the numbering feature in Writer), about CWS work (Sophie reported about her experience with CWS chartuseability01 and her work together with Chart developer Ingrid Halama). Rudlof Ferenc mentioned his team's work on OpenOffice.org source code analysis. And we talked about many many more things in detail..

All in all I think it was a very informative meeting and every attendee was able to take home new ideas and some information he/she was not aware of. The QA Camp was planned as an open house event but to my surprise most of the attendees stayed the whole three hours (!) and discussed and discussed.... :-)

I want to thank everybody making this event a success ! Especially I would like to thank the organizational team of this conference !

Vaadin and ZK are both popular RIA frameworks that have been tested to work with GlassFish v3. The JavaDude has a detailed blog on "ZK 3.6.3 with Netbeans 6.8 Beta on Glassfish V3" (this is the ZK release from a few days ago). It discusses developing with or without the ZK community plugin for NetBeans (which is mostly about adding meta-data to a Java EE project), creating ZUML pages with a component palette and deploying to GlassFish v3. This framework does Ajax and push with no JavaScript exposed to the developer and should be familiar to people used to Swing development. Bobby wrote a blog entry you may want to revisit.

Vaadin is another framework that keeps the developer away from JavaScript. It builds on GWT and has some interesting OSGi features that make it a good fit for the GlassFish v3 modular architecture. Vaadin's Petter has several tutorials showing the use of the GlassFish servlet 3.0 implementation but also how the Vaadin OSGi packaging allows for various options to avoid having to carry the framework with the application. It also discusses having multiple versions of the framework deployed in GlassFish v3. If you're interested, start with this "Deployment Options on GlassFish v3" article.

Both ZK and Vaadin are GlassFish Partners, just like WebORB, ICEFaces (now in Alpha and tested to work in the most recent promoted builds of GlassFish v3) and many others.

This is the first of our weekly news catch-up and covers Nov 1 to Nov 11, 2009. This week the news catch-up is partial; next week I'll create the entry through the week and will try to be more comprehensive. This week we also cover old news on JRuby and OSGi.

GlassFish and Middleware News

• IBM DeveloperWorks: Introducing Metro. Nice to see IBM refering to the GlassFish WebServices implementation as it is Used by Many, including IBM. Incidentally, the article triggered several internal and external threads on the topic, see for example: Broken Fault Handling in Metro.
• Subversion is now an Apache Incubator podling and same for LibCloud (from Apache incubator)
• New IzPack, and new GlassFish v2.1.1 installer (via alexismp)
• Sun's Financial results for Q3FY2010 are now available. The revenue for MiddleWare+MySQL are shown as a single entry and are (slightly) up, Year-to-Year (Y/Y); Java and OpenStorage are significantly up Y/Y; other segments are down Y/Y. Also check the numbers for previous quarters.
• IntelliJ IDEA 9 (Maia) goes Beta with full JavaEE 6 (and GlassFish v3) suport.
• Sun's to cut 3000 jobs.
• New record month in GlassFish GeoMap numbers (more details still to come).

Predicting our Systems Future

• Systems-related: New DTrace CheatSheet, Simple LB in OpenSolaris
• Latest installment in Chris's series on Reduced Install of OpenSolaris. The series deserves a spotlight...
• Dedup in ZFS. This is a big deal; DeDup is big $$ business.

From the past: OSGi in GlassFish (triggered by this thread):

• Sahoo has done a lot of work on the OSGi portion of GF; see his blogs on: Running GlassFish on Equinox (and other OSGi Platforms), OSGi enabled web applications inGlassFish, Developing Hybrid (OSGi + Java EE) applications in GlassFish and Our second hybrid application: EJB as OSGi Service and OSGi Declarative Service bundle in GlassFish.
• Also see Arun's note building on this work at GlassFish v3 with different OSGi runtimes – Felix, Equinox, and Knoplerfish

From the past: JRuby on GlassFish (triggered by this thread)

• From GF Wiki: Getting Started with JRuby on GF

I've added a couple of new twists to the coverage of GlassFish News at TheAquarium to do a better job while controlling our time investment:

• I've started posting short news posts to my twitter feed as I encounter them;    also tweeting are Frank, Giuseppe, Andi, Binod and AlexisMP. • Nobody is tweeting at TheAquarium, but...    if you want to follow the tweets from the editors, use @theaquarium/editors. • We will continue doing the usual spotlights posts as time permits, • I'll do a weekly summary of news uncovered in the spotlights,

I've also started using ScribeFire to reduce the cost of creating posts, but this should be transparent to the readers.

Reporting on news is a losing battle, but I'm hoping that this approach will keep TheAquarium the best source for news on the (larger) GlassFish community while giving the editors a bit more "free" time to invest in other tasks.

The Devoxx conference is around the corner (in just over a week) and will take place in Antwerp, Belgium as every year, only a bit earlier than usual (December was just too close to the Christmas holidays). This week-long conference runs as follows: the first two days are 3-hour sessions to go deeper into the technology (they're called University sessions). The regular conference starts on the third day and offers keynotes and 1-hour sessions. Devoxx also has "Tools in actions" (30-minute), "BOFs", Quickies (15-minute), white boards, and more.

First and foremost, the Wednesday Sun and Oracle keynotes should not be missed (or to be watched later on Parleys) :
• Java, the Platform for the Future - Steve Harris (Oracle)
• Java EE 6 and GlassFish V3: Evolution of a Platform - Roberto Chinnici and Ludo Champenois.

But there's a also long list of GlassFish and Sun-related session for this year's session :

University talks :
• Enhancing the JavaServer Faces 2.0 Component Model - Roger Kitain
• SOA, OpenESB and OpenSSO Programming with Passion - Sang Shin
• The Java EE 6 Platform University - Antonio Goncalves, Alexis MP

Sessions:
• JDK7 Update - Mark Reinhold
• The Java EE 6 Platform - Antonio Goncalves
• Writing Asynchronous Web application (Comet) using the Atmosphere Framework - Jean-Francois Arcand, Paul Sandoz
• Project Coin - Joe Darcy
• Using BTrace and DTrace to Instrument and Analyse Java Applications - Simon Ritter
• Enhancing the JavaServer Faces 2.0 Component Model - Roger Kitain
• Managing GlassFish on OpenSolaris - Simon Ritter
• The Modular Java Platform & Project Jigsaw - Mark Reinhold
• Deep dive on the Java EE 6 platform with GlassFish V3 - Roberto Chinnici, Ludo Champenois

BOFs:
• Grizzzly Servlet Container - Jean-Francois Arcand
• Update JDK 7 - Mark, Alex, and Brian
• The Modular Java Platform & Project JigSaw - Mark Reinhold, Alex Buckley

Quickies:
• Java EE 6 and OSGi. Ludo Champenois

See you there!

Developer Snapshot build OOo-Dev OOO320_m4 which installs as OOo-DEV 3.2.0 has been uploaded.

If you find severe issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org's bug tracking system IssueTracker.

Please use the following link:
http://download.openoffice.org/next

Packages are also available from extended mirror sites ( listed with an [E] ) from the ".../extended/developer/OOO320_m4" directory:
http://distribution.openoffice.org/mirrors/#extmirrors

Release Notes:
http://development.openoffice.org/releases/OOO320_m4_snapshot.html

MD5 checksums:
http://download.openoffice.org/next/md5sums/OOO320_m4_md5sums.txt

Did you know that OOo has its own YouTube channel? Check out the interesting and informative new videos available for your viewing and listening pleasure:

Clayton Cornell live in  "OpenOffice.org - How to Contribute -
Documentation Project"

Or even better...get on the fan page in Facebook and upload a video of yourself.

You can share your personal OOo story with the world and motivate people to join the ever-growing OOo community. To make a video, you only need a computer with a webcam and the latest adobe flash player installed. To record a video on the page wall, follow the steps below:

1. Go to the page (become a Fan).
2. Select "Add Video" from the Publisher bar.
3. Record a video.
4. Click "Post."

Liz