The best (the only?) way to test both of these features without installing the JRockit JVM itself is to install Mission Control as an Eclipse (3.7) plugin using its update center.

Once you switch to the Mission Control perspective, locally running JVMs (Apple’s latest 1.6 JVM, the JDK 7 Developer Preview or OpenJDK) are all detected with “General”, “MBeans” and “Runtime” sections very much functional. It’s still early days with the Flight Recorder and Memory Leak Detector features not yet available.

Looking at a JVM running GlassFish 3.1.1, the application server AMX’s are available once you initiate a bootAMX operation.

Several folks asked me when my Java EE 6 session with Antonio Goncalves was scheduled (we’ve been covering this for the past two years in University sessions, hands-on labs and regular sessions). It turns out we didn’t team up this year (Antonio was crazy busy preparing for Devoxx France) and I had a regular GlassFish session. Instead, this year, Bert Ertman and Paul Bakker covered the 3-hour Java EE 6 University session (“Duke’s Duct Tape Adventures”) on the very first day (using GlassFish) with great success it seems. The Java EE 6 lab was also a hit with a full room of folks covering a lot of technical ground in 2.5 hours (with GlassFish of course).

GlassFish was also mentioned during Cameron Purdy’s keynote (pretty natural even if that surprised a number of folks that had not been closely following GlassFish) but also in Stephan Janssen‘s Keynote as the engine powering Parleys.com.

In fact Stephan was a speaker in the GlassFish session describing how they went from a single-instance Tomcat setup to a clustered GlassFish + MQ environment. Also in the session was Johan Vos (of Mollom fame, along other things). Both of these customer testimonials were made possible because GlassFish has been delivering full Java EE 6 implementations for almost two years now which is plenty of time to see serious production deployments on it.

The Java EE Gathering (BOF) was very well attended and very lively with many spec leads participating and discussing progress and also pain points with folks in the room. Thanks to all those attending this session, a good number of RFE’s, and priority points came out of this. While this wasn’t a GlassFish session by any means, it’s great to have the current RESTful Admin and upcoming Java EE 7 planned features be a satisfactory answer to some of the requests from the attendance.

Last but certainly not least, the GlassFish team is busy with Java EE 7 and version 4 of the product. This was discussed and shown during the Java EE keynote and in greater details in Jerome Dochez’ session. If any indication, the tweets on his demo (virtualization, provisioning, etc…) were very encouraging.

Java EE 6 adoption is doing great and GlassFish, being a production-quality reference implementation, is one of the first to benefit from this. And with GlassFish 4.0, we’re looking at increasing the product and community adoption by offering a pragmatic technical solution to Java EE PaaS deployments. Stay tuned ! (the impatient in you is encouraged to grab a 4.0 build and provide feedback).

GlassFish – Serveur Java EE Open Source et Opérationnel

Jeudi 3 novembre 2011

15h00 à Paris

10h00 à Montréal

S’enregister

jeudi 3 novembre 2010 de 9h30 à 16h30.

Oracle France – 15, boulevard du Général de Gaule 92715 Colombes

Au programme: présentation et labs (venir avec son portable).

Inscriptions en ligne (places limitées).

En parlant de GlassFish, voici un nouvel ouvrage en préparation.

Before I start I probably should say that while I don’t have hard data to back this up, I’ve seen a large number of JUG’s be created in the past 2-3 years, more than 10 years after Java was first introduced, accounting for maybe as much as half of today’s active JUGs. In France alone, there is more than a dozen active JUGs that were created, all in the last 3-4 years. There doesn’t seem to be a shortage of interest for Java, quite the opposite.

I don’t run a JUG nor am I really active in one but I’ve been visiting many of them in the past few years (they tend to be the format that I like best), I’ve seen a good number of them take off, some crash, and I interact with several JUG leaders on a regular basis, so I thought I’d share the ingredients that I believe are key to a successful JUG.

First, you need to have a venue. It may sound obvious but the lack of a regular (hopefully free-of-charge) room for your meetings is often the reason for JUG activity going down or simply disappearing. Universities seems to be the best solution after company meeting rooms.

Second, you need sponsors. While this can cover for Pizza & Beer (or Wine & Cheese, you decide), maybe more importantly this should help you cover for your speakers expenses (travel + hotel). While those speakers employed by large companies should be able to expense their entire travel, you don’t want to miss out on the independent consultants. Another option is to have formal JUG members paying a yearly fee. This works well once you have a well established set of events, including maybe a yearly (international) conference.

Third, last, and not least – you need good content. This is content that addresses your JUG’s interests and it doesn’t have to be always about bleeding edge technology of the latest and greatest JVM language. Some folks take JUG’s as a training, others mostly as a get-together, and probably also a good chunk as a way to stay on top of what’s new in the Java ecosystem. You need to balance different topics but my recommendation would be to have a small set of folks decide on the agenda. Voting or large groups of folks deciding don’t usually work too well.

While all of the above probably applies for any technology user group, JUG’s are a bit special because they are loosely federated by mailing lists and interactions are facilitated by Sun initially and now by Oracle. If you are starting a JUG, you probably want to read about it on this all-in-one page, be listed on java-user-groups and start chatting with fellow JUG leaders, they are a great bunch and will most certainly have tips for you.

I should of course not forget to mention that you’ll need energy and passion to keep a JUG running. Lot’s of it!

I’m just back from a very well-attended inaugural session at the Lava JUG (in Clermont Ferrand, France) covering Java 7 (together with Julien) and some JavaOne 2011 news. The event had 120+ participants. So pictures here. It’s always great to hear about new JUGs popping up close to 15 years after the creation of Java (more on JUGs in a future entry).

This coming week, I’ll be in Romania:

• Cluj Napoca on Wednesday 19th, 2011 in the Golden Tulip Hotel. Send email to register.

• Bucharest on the next day: Thursday 20th, 2011 in the Intercontinental. See event page for details.

The week after (October 27th), I’m participating in fOSSa in Lyon, France. This is, as the name implies, an Free/Libre open source software conference and I’m happy to see that Serli’s Jerome Petit is also listed as a speaker to discuss the benefits he see for his company in their numerous open source contributions (GlassFish and others). Let this talk enlighten many others!

Septembre 2007 :

Septembre 2011 :

Ca représente une augmentation de x7,5 du nombre de discussions (contre x2.5-3 pour les autres) et de x6 du nombre de message (contre x2,0-3 pour la compétition).

• JUG Summer Camp le 16 septembre, déjà une tradition (La Rochelle)

• Soirée CDI au Mars JUG le 20 septembre (Marseille)

• Programme NormandyJUG, début le 20 septembre (Rouen)

• Open World Forum fait la Java, le 23 septembre (Paris)

Le tout donc sur une semaine et toutes ces conférences/réunions sont gratuites.