CommunityOne is a free and open developer conference that preceded JavaOne 2008 today (Monday May 5). I was there to learn more about GlassFish, Sun open source enterprise application server. One lesson I learned was that you can use a GlassFish application to deploy intelligent heating control in order to reduce CO2 emissons, and monitor your heating on a mobile phone.
GlassFish is both the name of Sun’s most active open source community and the name of the application server that the community is developing. The community, which was launched on java.net in 2005 includes users, partners, testers, and, of course, developers. The current version, V2 UR2 (Update Release 2), of the application server is a reference implementation of Java Enterprise Edition (EE) 5.
Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart, Distinguished Engineer at Sun, started off the first CommunityOne GlassFish session with an overview of open source development, the GlassFish community and the current version of the server. He said that not only do open-source community development lead to better products and more widespread adoption, it is also a viable model for business today.
In parallel with the open-source GlassFish application server, there is commercial application server now called the Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 UR2. While the commercial server consists of the same Java Archive (JAR) files, the commercial server comes with support from Sun and has gone through much more extensive testing and bug-fixing. To highlight the tight relationship between the open-source and the commercial branches of the development project, however, the commercial server will be called Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server 2 UR2 starting from next week, according to Pelegri-Llopart.
At the session, new features of the next “fully buzzword compliant” GlassFish version (V3), was also presented, by Jerome Dochez, Principal Engineer at Sun and GlassFish architect. The GlassFish V3 application server, currently its tp2 (Technology Preview 2) release, provides a much more modular, lightweight, extensible architecture.
“More and more people want choice, they don’t just want Java EE, they don’t just want Ruby on Rails [a free web application framework]. Instead, they want an environment where they have the choice of doing a bit of their application in this environment and another bit of the application in a different environment,” Dochez said after the session.
GlassFish v3’s module management will give application developers this choice. Not only various types of services can be added to the application server, but because of modular approach in V3, the services can also be started or stopped on demand. Application developers typically do not need to learn about these details, however.
“To the application developer, the new features in GlassFish v3 does not change anything, which is what he or she wants. You just want to take your application in its native original format without having to go through a complicated war file repackaging and deploy it to the application server. That’s it,” Dochez says.
There was also a “lightning talks” GlassFish session where six speakers each gave a 5-10 minute talk about various projects in the GlassFish community. Christer Boberg, expert in IP Multimedia Applications at Ericsson, was one of the speakers. He gave a brief introduction to SailFin, the GlassFish Communication Server, which is built on an application server that Ericsson contributed to the SailFin project at last year’s JavaOne.
Christer Boberg
Another speaker was Java Champion and Java EE expert Adam Bien, who talked about GreenFire, a system which allows him to automatically manage the heating system of Bien’s home in Bavaria, Germany, in order to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions. The system gives him an RSS feed every 5 minutes with information about the current state of the heating system, the external temperature and the weather for example. The information can, of course, be read off from a mobile phone
Adam Bien
Bien’s conclusion:
“Hacking Java EE 5 is good for the environment!”
By Olle Blomberg
Related links:
CommunityOne:
http://developers.sun.com/events/communityone/
GlassFish:
https://glassfish.dev.java.net/
SailFin:
https://sailfin.dev.java.net/
GreenFire:
https://greenfire.dev.java.net/
