Jason Lee 2011-03-04

If you've been following my series on using the GlassFish REST interface, you've probably noticed that your JSON and XML output isn't pretty-printed like mine. While there are several online tools that can fix that for you, there's no need for the extra step. GlassFish will do that for you. Let's look at how to make that happen.

Jason Lee 2011-02-28

In previous posts, I've shown various ways to manage a GlassFish 3.1 server via its REST interface. As nice as that is, we also support monitoring your server via REST as well. In this article, we'll take a look at some of the things you can ask of your server.

Jason Lee 2011-02-28

For those that may not have noticed, today the GlassFish team officially released version 3.1. This new release brings in a myriad of features, the most significant of which is probably clustering and high availability. The Aquarium is the best place to find links to blogs, screencasts etc. from various GlassFish engineers (though Markus Eisele has a nice run down of the new features here as well). The Aquarium's list is pretty extensive, so certainly check it out, but I'd like to highlight a few that I found interesting from teammates of mine:

People often ask what the difference is between the free GlassFish and the commercially-supported version. The answer really is "not much" in terms of the core server itself (pretty much just branding changes). The commercial version, though, has some nice value-add features, such as the Performance Tuner , amongst others.

I'm really, really pleased with how GlassFish 3.1 has turned out. We still (and will always) have more work to do, but this is a solid release that finally fills in some enterprise holes that v3 didn't have time to fill. Download it, install it, kick the tires a bit, and tell us what you what you think . In the meantime, we're going to go ahead and get started on 3.2.

From time to time, I'm asked about accessing various EE artifacts (EJBs, etc) from a standalone client. Almost invariably, the user is having trouble getting the environment setup, grabbing an InitialContext, etc. Also almost invariably, my answer to them is "use the application client container", which is as far as I can take them. The topic of application client container, or ACC, came up again recently when I was asked on Twitter about an issue with ACC and GlassFish in a clustered environment. While this user (hi, Markus! figured out his issue before I could be of much help, I took this opportunity finally to learn exactly what the ACC is and how to use it. Thanks to Oracle's Tim Quinn for his patient and tireless help, here's what I learned...

Jason Lee 2011-02-17

After posting my last entry, and a Secured Admin User , I was asked about an entry on using GlassFish 3.1's REST interface with secure admin enabled. Some of you may be asking, "Isn't that what you just wrote about?" While the titles sound the same, they're slightly different, but in a very significant way. Let's take a quick look at secure admin and then see what our REST client needs to do make use of this new server configuration.