Just days after the official release of GlassFish V2 in September 2007, we migrated one of our production applications from JBoss 4 to GlassFish V2. I had been playing with GlassFish V1 and later V2 for many months and -really- liked the command line and web based admin console. Earlier I had been given the opportunity to make major changes to our application to port it over to Java EE 5 using features such as JSF, JPA, JAX-WS and EJB 3. I had also converted our proprietary JBoss JMX MBean service to a standard JCA resource adapter. The rollout of GlassFish V2 and the new version of our application went smoothly, and we lived happily ever after. Well, not quite. A few weeks later we experienced our first lockup.

A few years ago Sun adopted an open source business model. I get the impression that back then they decided to freshen their entire product line, and we are now starting to see the fruits of their labor.

OpenSolaris reached first release this month after a few years of development. It brings an almost three decade mature UNIX platform onto the desktop with the usability of Ubuntu Linux. It still has some work to be done, but it looks very promising. I'm looking forward to Solaris 11 for servers with the new package system and clean install. In some forums I read that there may never be a Solaris 11, just OpenSolaris from now on.

I also subscribe to the OpenDS mailing list and after two years of development they are at a 1.0 release. Already there are people talking about switching over from OpenLDAP and other products.

Not too long ago I remember reading blogs and comments from people saying that Sun should just give up with NetBeans and build an IDE on top of Eclipse like everyone else. With the release of NetBeans 6.0 and especially 6.1 I'm seeing more and more people give it a try or switch over completely. I've even seen a number of IntelliJ IDEA people talk about how NetBeans is at a point where they can switch to it as a primary IDE. I guess hell has frozen over.

I'm noticing the same thing happening with the GlassFish application server. It wasn't too long ago that people wouldn't consider GlassFish because they thought it wasn't production ready. With the release of GlassFish V2 things have changed and there is now a significant community of production users. The mailing list is also very active and helpful. I think that the release GlassFish V3 will be a real tipping point. A light weight application server with a full featured web admin console, command line tools, clustering, open source, great documentation, commercial support, active mailing list, and Java EE 6 if you want it. V3 will have tons of new features, many of which were suggestions from the community. How can Tomcat continue to compete with that?

OpenSSO is also getting a lot of press these days. They are making one of the industry's most full featured single-signon products usable by mere mortals.

I wonder when we'll see the Sun stock go up significantly? I expected it to go up with the release of the UltraSPARC T2 processor - the most incredible processor in the world. It was under development for the past 5 years. Maybe the stock went up a bit, but not significantly. Maybe people are waiting to see if an open source business model will really work. I read complaints from people saying that Sun doesn't provide investors with enough detail about software income. Maybe that will change soon?

The other day I received a phone call from Tom Manos of Centric CRM asking if I'd be willing to help get their CRM product running on Glassfish. He said that Sun would like to see Centric CRM running on Glassfish, and that he found one of my posts in his forums asking about Glassfish support. I offered to look at it over the weekend. Today I got Centric CRM running on Glassfish V2/Java 6/PostgreSQL 8.2/Ubuntu 7.04. I had to modify the build.xml script to support Glassfish, and figure out a couple of other small details. I have posted the build.xml patch in their File Submissions forum, and instructions in my original thread.

In the past I have chosen to use the commercial version of Glassfish (Sun Java Application Server 9.0), because it comes with a graphical installer and our customers have the option to buy support for it. Other than those two differences, they are exactly the same product. When used on Windows, the SJAS graphical installer has a checkbox on one of the screens to create a Windows service. Glassfish does not come with a graphical installer, and requires a full JDK for installation. It is still simple to install, but lacks an easy way to create a Windows service.

The final release date for Glassfish V2 (and also Sun Java Application Server 9.1) is September 17 2007. I've been using Glassfish V2 lately because of the features, performance, and I wanted to make sure that my apps run on it. The instructions to create a Windows service look like this:

One of my more recent challenges at work has been to secure the web service communication between two servers that live behind a firewall. I wanted the communication to be encrypted, and to require some form of authentication. I also needed to provide access to a specific method from one of the web services to several third parties who's servers are also behind the firewall. These third parties were using Java 1.4 on a BEA WebLogic server, and Apache/PHP on the other. In this entry I will discuss the solution to the problem with exact command line and source code examples.

Web service security was new to me and I explored many avenues before arriving at transport layer SSL and HTTP BASIC authentication. Initially I was looking at using Sun Access Manager to do message level end-to-end security. Later I looked at using the new WSIT (Web Service Interoperability Technology) and it's corresponding NetBeans plugin. These are both very impressive and powerful technologies that are useful in situations where you may want to do single sign on, federated identity, LDAP, etc. I had the opportunity to have a lengthy conversation with three of the WSIT engineers at JavaOne about my scenario. They helped me realize that I don't need this level of sophistication for my simple requirements.