Miles to go …

Check out NetBeans 7.0 New and Noteworthy and the bundles matrix below:

Download now!

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Sahoo and I delivered OSGi-enabled Java EE Applications using GlassFish and Eclipse Hands-on Lab at Eclipse Con 2011 earlier this week. The conference had an excellent line up of sessions, speakers, receptions and I wanted to engage but could attend only one day. The keynote on the third day titled "The Java Renaissance" was jointly delivered by Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect of the Java Platform group at Oracle and John Duimovich, Java CTO at IBM. Read more coverage of the keynote and Oracle’s participation here.

The hands-on built a simple User Registration and Authorization application and showed different combinations of OSGi and Java EE development and deployment in GlassFish. The first step was to to deploy a simple OSGi service and client in GlassFish. Then the OSGi client was replaced by a Web Application Bundle (aka hybrid application) which used @OSGiService for dynamic discovery, bind, inject, and track the OSGi service (more details in TOTD #154). Then the service bundle was replaced by a JavaEE application using EJB and JPA. There were detailed instructions (PDF) to go through all the exercises. The screencast #38 (video) walks you through building the entire application, the video inlined here too:

About 35 attendees were able to make progress after the spotty Internet connection started working. The 5 USB sticks provided by Eclipse Con turned out pretty handy to pre-load all the software requisites. We shared a zip of our ".m2" directories and "m2eclipse-*" plugins directory for the folks with no Internet. The high point for me was when one of the attendees finished the entire lab in a little over an hour and left. That also helped us assess the quality of document which we tried to make pretty self explanatory. We found one missing instruction from the document and have already fixed it. Overall, about 60% of the attendees completed the lab and rest of them left with partial setup and instructions. Let us know if you attended the lab and found it useful.

Many thanks to Doug and Ankush, the Student Assistants assigned by EclipseCon for our labs, to help attendees keep chugging along!

I was also "lucky" to win a BlackBerry 9670 smartphone + remote stereo bluetooth gateway + international charger + headset. The RIM folks told me that this worth $700 but Amzon sells the raw phone for $19.99. The total cost comes out way under $100 even after including all the accessories. Anyway this device runs only on Sprint so of no use to me. Are you interested in purchasing ?

The reception in the evening (typically the best part) was great and gave me a chance to socialize with several folks. Here are some pictures captured from the event:

Technorati: conf eclipsecon osgi javaee glassfish eclipse

GlassFish is thriving very well under the stewardship of Oracle!

The GlassFish 3.1 with full clustering and high-availability for Java EE 6 applications was released recently, the Java EE 7 JSRs were recently approved with flying colors, work has already started on GlassFish 3.2 to enable virtualization and PaaS capabilities, GlassFish 4.0 will align with Java EE 7 and released along with it in Q3 2012, and so there is lots of excitement and new work in the months to come.

And to support these growing needs the GlassFish team needs smart engineers like you at our Prague location!

There are several open positions and here is a brand new one to build the installer framework and associated tools. The key job requirements are:

• Contribute to the design and development of installation/uninstallation programs for GlassFish
• Design, develop and maintain frameworks and programs to install the binaries, configure GlassFish Server and upgrade existing binaries
• Work with cross-functional teams such as documentation, performance and quality
• Innovate and contribute at a very high pace in an open source project

Do you want to work the most popular open source application server ?

Do you want to work on the cutting edge technologies ?

Do you have it in you to make a difference ?

Apply now! or send your resume to .

Technorati: glassfish hiring prague installer jobs

Subraya Mallya has launched his latest venture, tinyhabit.com, using Java EE 6 & GlassFish 3. Watch all the details in this short video:

A more formal story is coming soon!

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This screencast provide detailed instructions on how to develop OSGi-enabled Java EE Applications using GlassFish and Eclipse which will be delivered as a 2-hrs tutorial at the EclipseCon 2011.

You can download the required software and follow the detailed instructions (PDF) along with this screencast. Enjoy the screencast in HD in the full-screen mode:

Here are some time lines in case you want to move around in the screencast:

Introduction & Software Installation	0:00
Exercise 1 (Simple OSGi Service and Client)	2:42
Exercise 2 (Web Application Bundle)	11:57
Exercise 3 (EJB OSGi Service)	27:28
References	40:10

Many thanks to Doug & Ankush for an extensive review of the instructions!

Let us know your feedback by posting a question to the GlassFish Forum.

Technorati: conf eclipsecon osgi javaee glassfish eclipse screencast

Sahoo and I are delivering a tutorial on Developing OSGi-enabled Java EE Applications using GlassFish at EclipseCon 2011 tomorrow.

Date ? Mar 23, Wednesday
Time ? 2 hrs starting at 3:50pm
Where ? Stevens Creek

This blog provides a complete list of software that needs to be downloaded and pre-installed in order to actually spend time on building the application during the lab.

Please install the software following the instructions below. The complete tutorial + a screencast showing all the instructions to build the application will be shared on this blog tomorrow.

1. Download and extract the source bundle for the tutorial from http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/resource/osgi-gf-econ-2011.zip. Expanding the folder creates a directory “osgi-gf-econ-2011” with the following structure:
   

   bin/
   common/
   parent-pom/
   pom.xml
   simple_client/
   simple_service/
   

   The directory structure is explained later in the tutorial.

2. Download Java EE 6 Web Profile SDK Update 2 and Install
   1. If you have JDK 1.6.0 pre-installed on your machine then download the bundle “without JDK”.
   2. If not, then download the “with JDK” bundle.

      Make sure GlassFish is installed in a directory with no white spaces in the directory name. Otherwise the web-based Admin Console may not function properly.

      For convenience, make sure to include “glassfish3/bin” in the system PATH. This can be done using Control Panel in Windows and in a shell in Unix-flavored machines. Note, make sure that GlassFish is installed in a directory with no white spaces in the directory name.

      Also set the environment variable JAVA_HOME to point to the location of the JDK installation and include $JAVA_HOME/bin in the system PATH. Note, this will be %JAVA_HOME%\bin on Windows-based machines.

3. Typically Java EE SDK installation starts the GlassFish server for you. However if it has not started then it can be started explicitly by giving the command

   “asadmin start-domain”.

   The “–verbose” switch may be specified on the command line to view the log output in the console otherwise the logs can be seen in the “glassfish3/glassfish/domains/domain1/logs/server.log” file. Visit “http://localhost:8080” to ensure that the server is up and running.

4. Enable OSGi features in GlassFish by executing “config-gf-osgi.[bat|sh]” script in the “bin” directory of the source bundle extracted above.
5. Start the database as “asadmin start-database” in a separate window.
6. Download Eclipse Helios for Java EE Bundle and install.
7. Install the m2eclipse "core" plug-in from http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/sites/m2e, and only 3 of the m2eclipse "extras" from http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/sites/m2e-extras including Maven Integration for Eclipse Extras, Maven Integration for Eclipse WTP, and Maven OSGi development (not Maven Integration for Subclipse). Complete installation instructions are available at http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/installing-m2eclipse.html. Restart Eclipse after the install is completed.
8. Maven 2.2.1 – can be downloaded from http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/maven/binaries/apache-maven-2.2.1-bin.zip.
9. Make sure to set the environment variable MAVEN_HOME to point to the location of the Maven 2.2.1 installation. This will allow you to use the Maven commands from the CLI.
10. Configure Maven 2.2.1 in Eclipse – In “Eclipse”, “Preferences…” menu, search for the “maven”, select “Installations”, click on “Add…”, and select the location of unzipped Maven 2.2.1 directory.

See ya tomorrow!

Technorati: conf eclipsecon osgi javaee glassfish eclipse tutorial

Its always good to meet the usual set of speakers. Here is some feedback received from the audience on Day 2 about the event:

• First 2 sessions were good, last 2 sessions were boring
• Enlightening session from Duncan, everything well organized, sessions were informative
• Session about angular was very nice, saw the difference with jQuery
• It was very nice, Javabeans by Gupta and angular was "very fine"
• Will come back again next year
• Have the event on Friday/Saturday

Check out the pictures captured …

The conference coincided with two major events in India – first the Holi, the festival of colors, falls on the coming weekend and second the Cricket World Cup 2011 is in a very interesting state right now with three teams yet to qualify for quarter finals with only two matches remaining. So you could see colors being sold at different parts of the city. And then the fever that runs in the mind of every Indian was evident with TV screens showing live telecast of matches every where. And just so that you can live the spirit of World Cup little, here is the anthem to enjoy:

May the best team win the world cup and I hope India shows its prowess this time

And the complete set of pictures …

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Technorati: conf sparkit india bangalore javaee6 glassfish netbeans

This Q&A session is part of the community feedback on Java EE 6. So far the highlighted benefits are:

• QA#1 – Standards compliance, vendor independence, milliseconds and kilobyte deployment.
• QA#2 – Higher integrated specifications, simple and annotation driven, single-classloader WARs. Next level of industry standard
• QA#3 – Jigsaw puzzle, Modular, standard, less xml, easy, easy, have I said easy?
• QA#4 – Developers can concentrate on business logic, JavaEE6 is providing a standard for the infrastructure.
• QA#5 – Faster development, less frameworks, less complexity, more great code shipped.
• QA#6: Not your fat grandfather’s enterprise Java anymore, enterprise Java renaissance
• QA#7: Scripting framework like productivity based on standards
• QA#8: Definite excuse to avoid Spring forever
• QA#9: XML-less, annotated POJO, light app servers, EJB-in-a-WAR
• QA#10: Simplified Java Development, Focus on building great products

This entry comes from Marcus Kara who is 25 years old, living in The Netherlands with his wife & 1 year old daughter. Software developer for living for over 4 years. Really interested in technology in general and also did electronic engineering in the spare time, but there is a little spare time with a child. He likes Java because its platform independent (in a "the write once, run anywhere" way and vendor independent way) and there is a real eco-system around Java. The possibilities are endless (for some people this is a reason to not choose Java ).  The WORA concept of Java really impressed him when he bought a 100 Euro NAS (Lacie NetworkStorage 2, simple ARM-based NAS) and started GlassFish v3 on it. It just runs without any hassle. He is called "idiot" for running an enterprise app server on a NAS .

Here is a short summary of Java EE 6 from him:

Do more with less! It’s almost no effort to create an enterprise application.

Keep reading for the fun stuff …

1. How are you using Java EE 6 today ? What limits your adoption ?

We’re currently using Java EE 6 for all new Java projects. Since we have some small projects we can choose our platform every time we have a new project. I was using Java EE 5 before Java EE 6 was out. We started to create Java EE 6 applications about a year ago. First application in production is now about half-year ago. Since Java EE 6 has so many advantages over Java EE 5 we quickly adopted Java EE 6, honestly without limits.

2. What Java EE 6 technologies are you using and why ?

Currently we use the web profile for our applications, it’s really lightweight (if you compared it to a full Java EE 5 app server). We’re trying to get the most out of the platform, so grab the new possibilities with both hands. Since we were using Facelets also on JSF 1.2 it’s no surprise that we love using JSF 2.0. The f:ajax tag really rocks and works! Also the lack of faces.xml configuration also simplified development. The new version of JPA with better cache handling also improves our application performance. The feature what I really like is definitely CDI, Injection & Validation are things we were really missing in the Java EE API.

3. What is your development and deployment environment ?

We develop our applications in Netbeans 6.9 on a local Glassfish v3.0.1 installation. The in-place deployment feature of Netbeans & Glassfish speeds up development, no need to wait a long time if you made a change in your code.

Our deployment environment currently:
Test: 1x Glassfish v3.1, 1x Glassfish v3.0.1
Production: 1x Glassfish v2.1 cluster (3 nodes), 1x Glassfish v3.0.1 server, currently planning an upgrade of our Glassfish v2.1 cluster to Glassfish v3.1.
We mainly use MySQL as our RDMS, but we also have a lot Oracle & MS SQL servers. These are mosly used for getting data.

More details on the GlassFish production deployment coming in a separate entry.

4. What previous versions of Java EE / J2EE have you used ? How has the migration to Java EE 6 benefited ?

As mentioned by question 1, we’re using Java EE 5. I looked to SpringSource but a migration would take some time and I really don’t like all the xml configuration of the beans in Spring (I don’t know what the current status is). The migration from Java EE 5 to Java EE 6 has a lot of benefits, most important one is that the platform is much more efficient in an development way. Less hassle and do more. The API’s included in Java EE 6 (almost) don’t require to use other frameworks/libraries.

5. Describe the benefits of Java EE 6 to you in 120 characters.

Do more with less! It’s almost no effort to create an enterprise application.

6. Advice for anybody who is looking at Java EE 6 for their next project ?

You should definitely use the CDI API. The first one I created a project on JSF2 and JPA without CDI. After Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine inspired my at the J-Fall 2010 conference I took some time to get into CDI and really loved it!

7. What new features you’d like to see in Java EE 7 ?

Built-in kind of @ViewScope (JSF2 annotation) also in CDI. Built-in SeamFaces.

Thank you Marcus for taking time to prepare the answers!

Are you developing, deploying, consulting, training, authoring books, etc in Java EE 6 and would like to express your opinion in a similar format ? Drop acomment on this blog and I’ll line you up for the Q&A session

The Java EE 6 hub is your key resource to learn all about the technology.

And you can always try all Java EE 6 features in GlassFish and refer to an extensive set of Java EE 6 & GlassFish demos.

Also check out our youtube channel and follow us on @glassfish.

Technorati: javaee6 community feedback markcuskara glassfish v3

This Q&A session is part of the community feedback on Java EE 6. So far the highlighted benefits are:

• QA#1 – Standards compliance, vendor independence, milliseconds and kilobyte deployment.
• QA#2 – Higher integrated specifications, simple and annotation driven, single-classloader WARs. Next level of industry standard
• QA#3 – Jigsaw puzzle, Modular, standard, less xml, easy, easy, have I said easy?
• QA#4 – Developers can concentrate on business logic, JavaEE6 is providing a standard for the infrastructure.
• QA#5 – Faster development, less frameworks, less complexity, more great code shipped.
• QA#6: Not your fat grandfather’s enterprise Java anymore, enterprise Java renaissance
• QA#7: Scripting framework like productivity based on standards
• QA#8: Definite excuse to avoid Spring forever
• QA#9: XML-less, annotated POJO, light app servers, EJB-in-a-WAR

This entry comes from Subraya Mallya who is a technology executive with years of enterprise software experience building products and running large product teams. Prior to his current venture, as an advisor/consultant, he has helped companies with their Cloud Computing, Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service strategies. As a Chief Strategy Officer and VP of Product Management at Siterra he led the definition of product strategy, roadmap for a SaaS application that helped Wireless Infrastructure companies, Renewable Energy companies and Retail Chains roll out large capital asset programs.  Prior to that as a Director of Products at Oracle he led Product Development for various ERP, CRM and Supply Chain products. You can find more about him at http://www.linkedIn.com/in/subrayamallya and follow him on twitter @subrayamallya.

Here is a short summary of Java EE 6 from him:

Simplified Java Development that I always hoped it would be. Now we can just focus on building great products.

Keep reading for the fun stuff …

1. How are you using Java EE 6 today ? What limits your adoption ?

We are building a consumer app that is focused towards helping people attain better health. We are using Java EE6 for building the application, both the web application as well the mobile. For the UI we use PrimeFaces. Those guys in PrimeFaces are brilliant.

2. What Java EE 6 technologies are you using and why ?

We are using JSF2.0, JPA 2.0, Facelets, EJB 3.1, JAX-RS, . I think for the first time Java EE has become simple and not this big bloated technology framework that needed significant work before you could start building your application. I am using EJB3.1 and JPA2.0 Full Profile.

On the JSF side we are currently using ManagedBean but work is underway to move to CDI. In fact that I don’t need to manage a series of XML files with configuration information and just do the same with Annotations is such an improvement in productivity and reduction in maintenance overhead.

I am particularly impressed with the simplicity that has been delivered in EJB 3.1. We use Singleton (for metadata management), Asynchronous (for sending notification, managing activity stream, re-indexing), Timer (for schedule management, timed events). I remember building similar features and them taking months, now it is down to days. Having to just create a war file to package EJBs is so much more simpler

JPA has been great too. I was skeptical going in – thinking I might have to switch over to Hibernate later – but JPA 2.0 has been great. I have been able to model all kinds of entity-relationships and the ORM side has allowed me to do that. Something Pessimistic Locking with just one annotation is priceless. We are also impressed with the caching features which we have just started using.

JAX-RS is something we just started using for building out our services for data-interchange. Annotating EJBs and you get your services. We like it. Don’t need to worry about underlying REST complexities.

Besides Java EE 6 stuff, we also use iText, Apache Commons, Velocity, Lucene. 100% java shop  

3. What is your development and deployment environment ?

All our development is done using NetBeans. We have been long time Netbeans user – you download it and it is ready to start – no messing around with plugins etc – one of the reasons we switched over from Eclipse – too much crapware – to use a PC Vendor term.
Just a recent development, we moved all our desktops from Windows to Ubuntu and we have seen CONSIDERABLE difference in speed and resource consumption of NetBeans, with the same hardware configuration. I highly recommend people move to Ubuntu if you are a NetBeans user – atleast have a dual boot and use Ubuntu.

On the Appserver side – again, I started off skeptical about GlassFish. We thought we will have to transition to the good ‘ol Tomcat or JBoss. But I have to say, we have never spent time thinking about that since we started. GlassFish v3 has been good to us. Hopefully we keep getting upto date AMIs of GlassFish going forward.

On the database front, we have PostgreSQL and MongoDB. Our plans are to eventually completely move to MongoDB. We are currently figuring out how to make this indirection at the Persistence and Entity Manager layer. We are using Morphia to integrate MongoDB in.

4. What previous versions of Java EE / J2EE have you used ? How has the migration to Java EE 6 benefited ?

Almost all the versions from the time Java was introduced.

5. Describe the benefits of Java EE 6 to you in 120 characters.

Simplified Java Development that I always hoped it would be. Now we can just focus on building great products.

6. Advice for anybody who is looking at Java EE 6 for their next project ?

If you are a Java shop and have been frustrated with complexity in Java in the past, your pain has been relieved. You can get the same productivity that a RubyOnRails environment provides and with some upfront planning you can get dramatic productivity gains compared to past Java EE environments.

7. What new features you’d like to see in Java EE 7 ?

Having a hybrid database environment – RDBMS and NOSQL is reality. At this time we are working on PostgreSQL and MongoDB and working out those issues. I hope JPA gets aware of these environment and allows the indirection at the Entity Manager and Persistence Layer.

JPA is still does not have feature parity with Hibernate. Things like @Filter on the Entity is missing. It is a common scenario to have @OneToMany relation (say Department to Employee) where you want the traverse the relationship and fetch only the active employees.

Something like
@OneToMany(cascade = CascadeType.ALL, mappedBy = "dept&quot
@OrderBy("employeeName ASC")
@FilterBy("employeeStatus=’A'")
private List<Employee> employeeList;

Another thing I would love Java EE folks to handle, especially in Web profile, is to include things like MINIFY, CSS/JS compression tools that are publicly available. These things should be part of the build. As a company developing a web product, it does not make sense for every company to solve these problems. Atleast should be a configuration in the Project properties.

Another tool I would love to be included (granted not Java related but needed by every Java development team) is ability to build a image sprite.

Thank you Subraya for taking time to prepare the answers!

Are you developing, deploying, consulting, training, authoring books, etc in Java EE 6 and would like to express your opinion in a similar format ? Drop acomment on this blog and I’ll line you up for the Q&A session

The Java EE 6 hub is your key resource to learn all about the technology.

And you can always try all Java EE 6 features in GlassFish and refer to an extensive set of Java EE 6 & GlassFish demos.

Also check out our youtube channel and follow us on @glassfish.

Technorati: javaee6 community feedback subrayamallya glassfish v3

Odwalla is sponsoring two hundred endurance athletes for the year 2011 and I’m extremely excited to be picked from the 1000-odd applicants. And the quoted reasons to pick the athlete is "athletic accomplisments and sphere of influence" … certainly feels privileged!

Team Odwalla is basically 200 runners, triathletes, and cyclists (doubled from last year) who have a strong passion for the sport. Together these 200 athletes (from Boston, Miami, New York City, San Francisco, San Diego, Orange County, and Los Angeles) will compete in 600+ races and 200+ volunteer/charity/fund raising events. So far I’ve signed up for Bay to Breakers and San Francisco Half Marathon and will sign up for some other races and participate in charity events as well.  Let me know if you are in the San Francisco neighborhood and would like to run together. And I’m always up for running in any city as part of my upcoming travel circuit.

What do I get as part of the sponsorship ?

• Apparel
  • Tech Tee
  • Running Singlet, Running Shorts
  • Tri Top, Tri Shorts
  • Vented Running Jacket
  • Hat
  • Casual Jacket
• 480 oz of Odwalla bar samples, coupons, collateral to be shared with friends … so be nice to me and I might share with you Or leave a comment on this blog why do you think Odwalla helps you be a better athlete and I’ll bring one for you when we meet next!
• Training help
• Discount on Active Advantage
• Several other things
• Pride to be part of representing a company that I believe in

Did you know ?

• Odwalla bottles, even the caps, are 100% recyclable.
• The guiding principle for this 30 year old company is "Respect the Earth".
• Check out their annual Plant a Tree program and receive $100,000 worth of donated trees for your favorite national park, already donated 360,000 trees so far
• Great fruit makes great juice and take a look at Freshology which explains the philosophy behind creating them

I’ve always been a big fan of Odwalla brand for the past few years and see this as a great opportunity to team with a company that supports environmentalism and also have an impact on the local community. Here are some flavors that I’ve tried so far:

• Super Foods
  • GoMega
• Proteins
  • Vanilla Protein Monster
  • Super Protein Pumpkin
• Juices
  • Carrot Juice
  • PomaGrand
• Smoothies
  • Mango Tango
  • Strawberry C Monster
  • Citrus C Monster
  • Blueberry C Monster
• Bars
  • Banana Nut
  • Sweet & Salty Almond
  • Mocha-walla

And now certainly looking forward to try them all, sharing with you, and hopefully make an impact on the environment as well.

Here are some ways to stay connected with Odwalla:

• Odwalla website
• Odwalla @ Facebook
• @odwalla
• @ActiveAmb

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