September 17 - September 21, 2007
Experts: Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart, John Clingan, Sridatta Viswanath, Scott Oaks, Dhiru Pandey, and Harold Carr
GlassFish V2 builds on the quality and
feature richness of GlassFish V1 to provide higher value-add features for the enterprise. GlassFish V2 features clustering,
in-memory replication, improvements to the Grizzly-based HTTP engine, enhanced administrative functionality, improved
self-management capabilities, and more. In this Ask the Experts session, GlassFish experts Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart, John Clingan,
Sridatta Viswanath, Scott Oaks, and Dhiru Pandey answered a variety of questions about GlassFish V2.
Hannah Dow: When is GlassFish V2 supposed to be released? I keep seeing it listed as "upcoming release".
Is there an actual target release date?
John Clingan: As of today, September 17th, GlassFish V2 is released and
available for download.
The Sun-supported counterpart to GlassFish V2, also released today, is the
Sun Java System Application Server 9.1.
GlassFish V2 and the Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 offer the same set of features.
Z. Bowie: Can you give me an overview, or point me to an overview, of the clustering support in this new version
of GlassFish?
John Clingan:The Aquarium blog is a great way to stay
on top of GlassFish V2. This entry
points to a detailed clustering write-up by Nazrul.
Srinu: I've seen things like the following trumpeted by Sun regarding GlassFish performance:
"Highest ever score for SPECjAppServer 2004 on a single Sun Fire T2000 application server. This result is 10% higher than
WebLogic's score of 801.70." Do you have actual data to back that up? How about comparisons with JBoss and WebSphere?
Calvin Varney: I understand from some blog entries that all native code is gone in V2. Does this
include the dependencies on Netscape Portable Runtime (NSPR) and Network Security Services (NSS)?
Sridatta Viswanath: We have removed the dependency on NSS/NSPR in GlassFish v2. GlassFish v2 uses JKS by default.
If you like NSS/NSPR, you can download it separately and configure it in the enterprise profile. Essentially, both NSS
and JKS provide similar functionality except for the differences noted in
Shing Wai's blog.
We also have a bundle that includes NSS/NSPR. Note that this bundle also includes JDK and High-Availability Database (HADB)
for 99.999 % ("5 9's") of session availability and has a bigger download size.
gustav trede: What is the eta for clustered and loadbalanced web service session support?
Harold Carr: We have not tested web services, that is, the
Metro Web Services stack, with clustering and load balancing
at this time. We definitely know that failover will not work when SecureConversations or ReliableMessaging are used
(since they keep session state that is not currently saved). Failover might work in other scenarios but has not been tested.
We are starting to design HA, that is, Clustering and LoadBalancing, for Metro now. We hope to have it available the first
half of calendar year 2008.
douglas dooley: Congrats on the release of v.2, very impressive. I am still trying to figure out how you
pulled off the HA features, is there some Clustra functionality in there? Sorry about not digging in the user groups
to find this answer, and apologies if I am too vigorous in my defense of Glassfish on the public forums,
keep up the work.
Dhiru Pandey: The HA feature in GlassFish V2 is based on an implementation of in-memory replication for session state
(HTTP, EJB and SSO). This implementation is layered on top of Shoal
and JXTA, which provide the necessary group membership functionality
as well as the necessary communication framework for this.
Cole Phizer: Are there any migration issues that I need to consider in moving from GlassFish V1 to
GlassFish V2?
Sridatta Viswanath: No, not that I am aware of currently. Both GlassFish v1 and v2 are both Java EE 5-compliant servers.
We have tested them thoroughly to make sure that they are in fact compatible. We provide an
upgrade tool that can do the migration
for you directly. You will be able to upgrade from the v1 to v2 developer profile easily. Please let us know your experience -- that
will help us improve GlassFish.
Cyril Bouteille: How can you dynamically pass in an application classpath suffix to GlassFish V2 @ startup?
In V1, you could create variables in domain.xml, which you could set as -Dvars in the startserv
script, but asadmin start-domain doesn't go use this script any more.
See the forum thread How to pass properties to
glassfishv2 startup/domain.xml?
Sridatta Viswanath: This question has been answered in the forum.
Hannah Dow: When is GlassFish V2 supposed to be released? I keep seeing it listed as "upcoming release".
Is there an actual target release date?
John Clingan: As of today, September 17th, GlassFish V2 is released and
