GlassFish 3.2

Hi Java Enthusiasts,

I am including my notes on the release of GlassFish 3.2.
GlassFish 3.2 kicked off with a first Milestone:

• Mostly about integrating some bug fixes and has no major new feature
• Defining Virtualization Support and PaaS Enablement as the main two goals
• Total of 8 milestones leading up to October 2011
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• This feature will provide a Java EE centric solution to cloud computing that enables a user to deploy a Java EE application to the cloud.
• It's basically allowing GlassFish to be plugged into an existing virtualization infrastructure.
• Offers a Java EE centric way of deploying and managing applications without deep understanding of cloud infrastructure.
• PaaS feature
• Is set of services that will be available within a single process or as a set or processes running on different machines or virtual machines communicating with a well defined set of interfaces.
• It simplifies application deployment, application management and domain creation.
• The user is obviated of the need to manage the system at the infrastructure (machines, networking, software, storage) level.
• Architectural Components
• Orchestrator -- provides the ability to deploy an application to the cloud. Responsible for Service Dependency Discovery, Service Provisioning, Service Association and Deployment .
• Elasticity Manager -- responsible for providing elasticity to the deployed application, Metric collection, Scaling decisions and Action execution.
• IaaS Management Service (IMS) -- provides an abstraction of the IaaS cloud to the GlassFish software.  This abstraction encapsulates various APIs that are available for managing cloulds.
• Groups -- Machines are divided into groups. 
• Domains Manager -- responsible for automating the process of creating a domain within the cloud.
• Domains Manager Data Store -- stores user store configuration, IaaS management service configuration information, per-user domain configuration information.

Have Fun!!

Sunit

Java Blog@Oracle , JavaSpotLight #12

Hi Java Enthusiasts,

Podcast #12 from Oracle's Java blog is out now, posted on Jan 13, 2011. In the 30:16 minute long podcast, the discussion focused on,


1. GlassFish webinar series : 

With GlassFish 3.1 soon to be released, and Java EE 6 still a very popular topic, the GlassFish Webinar Series has you covered on lots of different topics. That's no less than 12 webinars scheduled before the end of May to cover the Java EE programming model, various tools, what's new in GlassFish 3.1, clustering, admin, productivity, Coherence*Web integration, HK2, Security, Embedded and more.

Free registration for the webinar link is also available.

For more info, click here.


2. Roller 5 on multiple Java EE AppServers:

Apache Roller is a full-featured, multi-user and group-blog server suitable for blog sites, large and small. Roller is a Java web application that runs on any Java EE server and any relational database and will soon ship version 5. Some of Roller's key features are, Multi-user blogging, Group blogging with three permisson levels (editor, author and limited), Support for comment moderation, control over blog layout/style via templates, Built-in search engine, Pluggable cache and rendering system, Support for blog clients that support MetaWeblog API and all blogs have entry and comment feeds in both RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 formats

It powers internal and external employee blogs at Sun, IBM and other companies as well as the JRoller.com Java blogging community. It also powers the Oracle Java blog (and all of blogs.sun.com - 5k+ blogs, 145k entries, hundreds of thousands of hits every day).

For more info, please click here and here.


3. Update on GlassFish 3.1:

GlassFish 3.1 Open Source Edition is scheduled to ship in February 2011. Building on the modular, Java EE 6 based GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 3.0, version 3.1 is the next major release of GlassFish Server Open Source Edition. This release is currently under development and will focus on the following features:

• Clustering and Centralized Administration
• High Availability

More info here.


4. Interview with Adam Bien:

Adam Bien has started Java development with JDK 1.0 in 1996. And since then, he has spent his whole career as a freelancer working on the server side with Java with efforts towards client side too. Following things were discussed during the interview.

• Swing and JavaFX 2.0 with java API with emphasis on Java FX script.
• With Java FX 2.0, with the Java API we can work with Groovy, Scala and the four guys, JRuby.
• Ease of Java EE 6 and 7 development.
• Apple's donation of Mac OS X to OpenJDK.

5. Oracle Magazine January/Februray 2011 - Simplicity by Design


6. 10 Things Java Should Steal from Ruby:

This was a session that was done by Bruce Tate in August of 2006. Discussion on how things look today is given below:

• Continuations which are basically syntactic method of implementing certain types of optimization, are not deemed to be a part of Java.
• Meta-programming is not available to Java because of the very nature of how statically typed the language is.
• Conventions over XML, ease of development in Java EE 5, which had to do with convention of a configuration as well as annotations rather than XML if you wanted to change that default behavior.

There were few other points which can be heard in the podcast.


Thanks and warm wishes!
Sunit Ronnie Ghosh

Beep Beep: Sun certification has changed

Hi Java Programmers and Enthusiasts,

Namaste from Sunit from India!

Effective September 1, 2010, all Java and other Sun related technologies' certifications have been re-published and re-branded under the Oracle Certification Program(OCP). At this time, only the titles of the certifications are changing. The exam formats and objectives will remain the same as they were under Sun. Certified folks remain unaffected and newbies will get Oracle certificates. Let us dig deep into this topic.

All Java and other Sun related technologies' certifications will continue to be available via Oracle's Certification Delivery Partner, Prometric. Visit

One great news!! Certification candidates no longer need to purchase vouchers to register for an exam. The process has been streamlined so you can simply register for an exam and pay for it with a credit card at prometric.com/oracle on September 1, 2010.

What Oracle website says:

Former Sun Certification Title	New Oracle Certification Title	Former Exam No.	Oracle Exam No.
Sun Certified Java Programmer (SCJP) SE 6	Oracle Certified Professional, Java SE 6 Programmer	CX-310-065	1Z0-851
Sun Certified Java Developer (SCJD)	Oracle Certified Master, Java SE6 Developer	CX-310-027, CX-310-252A	1Z0-856, 1Z0-855

For more information on further certification and structure changes, click here or for a pdf download, click here.

Benefits of the Oracle Certification Program are Added Credibility, Great Job Opportunities, Open Line of Communication with Oracle and Access to the OCP Member Only Website.

Prometric experience

I visited the Prometric site(prometric.com/oracle) and found out the following:

1. One needs to register in order to book an appointment. Also if you have given any other Prometric organized exam like CAT, you can use the Prometric Testing ID from that exam in the course of the registration. Be careful while filing the security question and answer as there is no choice of questions available.
2. On Tuesdays from 4:00 – 5:00 PM at most test sites, Prometric offers candidates of some programs the opportunity to experience the test centre and to go through all of the testing procedures prior to test day. One will also be able to sit at a test work station and go through a 15 minute fake test allowing you to use the hardware and become familiar with the equipment and question types. For more information, click here.
3. The Sun Academic Initiative,212 exams are no longer available. This voucher is now valid for all 310 exams (Oracle).
4. I opted for the Oracle Certified Professional, Java SE 6 Programmer (SCJP) course. There is no option for U.K English so had to chose U.S English instead.
5. There is no option for payment in local currency. The cost amounts to $125 for this course.
6. 190 test sites are available in India. One more pain is that there is no test location search option so you need to parse all the 190 test sites to get to yours. What a waste of time. I was lucky and got mine in the fourth page. In Hyderabad, there are 7 locations in total (Banjara Hills, RTC X Roads, Ameerpet, Paradise, Gandhi Medical college, Ram kote and Gachibowli).

All the folks out there planning for a certification, all the very best.

Sunit Ronnie Ghosh,
India.