Late last year and early this year, I spent a great deal of time to author/edit a white paper detailing the deployment of Sun Identity Manager using GlassFish and MySQL. The paper, with additional input from Ed Ort, Suveen Nadipalli and John Clingan, gives a brief introduction to what identity management is and why you’d want it, then covers the whats, hows, and whys of MySQL and GlassFish installation, the installation and configuration of Sun Identity Manager, tuning the system, and ends with a quick look at the total cost of ownership. I think we put together a very nice paper on a very interesting and oft-overlooked piece of enterprise data management. If you’re interested in reading more, you can click here for the download page.

Today at 1:00PM CST, the GlassFish team will host a webinar discussing the asadmin utility that ships with GlassFish. Here’s the official annoucment by Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart (webified be me :

If you are a member of a JUG (or happen to run one) and would like to be able to join the Java Community Process (JCP), you now have two options. For US-based JUGs, you can affiliate yourself with the new umbrella JUG-USA. According to Van Riper of the Silicon Valley JUG and the coordinator of the JUG-USA effort, all you need to do to be affiliated with JUG-USA is promise to link back to the JUG-USA Map and let him know. As an affiliated JUG, you have access to the JCP, including JSR submission as well as Expert Group membership, through JUG-USA. If, however, you’d like to have your JUG become a member directly, which is currently the only option (that I know of) for non-US JUGs, you can follow these directions (thanks, again, to Van Riper):

The Oklahoma City Java Users Group, Inc. will be utilizing both methods. :)

As I noted in a recent entry, we are considering moving to a desktop-like interface for the GlassFish Administration Console, where the content is in separate "windows" (decorated DIVs, basically) which can be moved, closed, minimized, etc. As I’ve started working on a concrete implementation of some of those ideas, I quickly realized that we were going to have issues with multiple, overlapping windows. Once you have multiple windows open, the user has to be able to bring the desired window to the front, but YUI, which will likely be the library used, doesn’t support that natively. Fortunately, that’s easy to fix. First, an example of the problem:

I needed a break this afternoon, so I thought I’d see how easy it is to bootstrap a JSF 2 project. One of the biggest complaints about JSF 1.x is all that XML, so JSF 2 is aiming to fix that. How have we done so far? Based on this quick look (which is my first from-scratch JSF 2 app), really, really well.

In a recent discussion, the fact that I have AT&T U-verse came up. I was asked what my thoughts on it are, and I promised a blog about it. This entry is the somewhat belated fulfillment of the promise.

First off, for those that don’t know, U-verse is, as best as I can tell, their answer to cable television. With the full package, which we have, you get a digital phone line, digital television, and high-speed internet all over fiber. Since the cable companies are offering telephone, it seems the phone companies are now offering television, with everyone in on this internet thing. For the impatient, the punch line here is that it’s a nice, but not perfect, offering. Let’s jump into the details.

If you’ve been following the evolution of the JSF 2 spec closely, you have probably seen the addition of a finer-grained event system (if you haven’t seen it, section 3.4 of the spec is the relevant one). These events include things like AfterAddToViewEvent, BeforeRenderEvent, ViewMapCreatedEvent, etc. An application developer could subscribe to these events from a managed bean by using the API exposed by the new system. While that is a big improvement over the way things work in 1.2, it still leave page authors out in the cold until, that is, this week. Yesterday I committed the code to support declarative even handling to Mojarra. In this short entry, we’ll take a look at what that entails, and how to use it.

GlassFish isn’t just an application server. It’s a community. For that reason, we on the admin console team want to take some time to run some ideas by the user community. For the GlassFish v3 final release due in the middle of next year, we plan to redesign the admin console. Since the admin console is usually high on the list of differentiators, we are approaching these changes very cautiously, as we don’t want to ruin a good thing. Our goals are to make the console lighter and faster, and use a more modern design. Our plan, then has several parts, which we’ll look at individually.

If so, you might be interested in the latest webinar from The Aquarium covering Java EE 6 and Servlet 3.0. Spec leads Roberto Chinnici and Rajiv Mordani will be leading the next session covering these two topics. Eduardo has the details.