The GlassFish and OpenESB session we hosted yesterday was very interesting. Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine, Java Architect at Sun Microsystems in France and GlassFish Evangelist (though he is none too happy the epitaph evangelist) presented a strong case for the GlassFish application server. For example as a contender for the number one spot for open source application servers, clearly challenging JBoss. And as an enterprise level JEE server with many additional components for for example SOA, Comet style Web Applications etc.
Wouter van Reeven (AMIS) presented after dinner on OpenESB, the open source project for SOA. OpenESB is built on a JBI backbone and contains a BPEL engine and a series of JBI Service Engines and Binding Components that support interaction with various protocols and services. Wouter presented a brief BPEL overview and then demonstrated how to quickly develop a BPEL process in NetBeans and deploy it on OpenESB. Very neat was the ‘breakpoints’ feature that allows step by step debugging of BPEL processes! Wouter’s presentation made it clear to many people in the audience that GlassFish & OpenESB could be a cost-friendly alternative to Enterprise SOA Suites from vendors such as Oracle and IBM.
Alexis proved a very entertaining speaker with way too much to tell for the time available. He briefly discussed GlassFish’s history, the current status (V2, the JEE 5 reference implementation) and the forseeable future: V3 (early 2009), the Reference Implementation for JEE 6. He also spent some time explaining how GlassFish works with other components in the entire stack – from hardware to software, including Virtualization (he mentioned VirtualBox, a recent Sun acquisition as an interesting option to check out) and Database. Alexis also walked us through a number of complementary projects that can help extend GlassFish in a number of very valuable ways. He specifically mentioned Hudson, the continuous integration server, Grizzly – the Comet Server – and OpenMQ, a fast JMS implementation.
Resources
Presentation by Alexis on GlassFish : GlassFishMay2008-Amis.pdf (1.8 Mb)
Presentation by Wouter on OpenESB: Creating-Apps-For-OpenESB-with-NetBeans.pdf (1 Mb)
Pictures
So how do we enlarge the font in NetBeans again?
Happy with the wooden shoes, isn’t he:
