The GlassFish V2 Beta Download Contest was designed to encourage developers to download the GlassFish V2 Beta, the Java EE 5 SDK Update 3 Preview, or the Java Application Platform SDK Update 3 Preview and describe their experiences. To qualify for the prize, developers had to download the GlassFish V2 Beta or either of the SDKs from the Java EE web site, then complete a survey, and send feedback. The contest ran March 12 to May 18, 2007, and all feedback was collected. The person with the best feedback, which was judged by a panel of experts, won an iPod Nano. Every two weeks, the judges evaluated the entries for that two-week period and awarded one iPod Nano. All four winners are listed below.
GlassFish V2 Beta Download Contest Winning Entries
May 25 Winner:
I'm new to application servers, but the performance alone is worth considering a migration from Apache! However, simple tasks in Apache, such as protecting a directory from public access, are reasonably difficult for new users of GlassFish. I especially like the administration interface look and design, but unfortunately, there isn't much to change in many sections unless you are intimately familiar with the innards of this server as many of the areas to tweak are cryptic and don't have a listing of available parameters to change and the available values. In this case, Webmins Apache module is much easier for novices to learn from. Server restart should be able to be done completely from the web GUI...not just a shutdown, go to CLI to restart.
- Wes Williams, USA
April 30 Winner:
I would love to see more collaboration with other web services implementations such as Axis2 to allow for a less painful development process. The experiences with web services has been painful leading up to the v2 beta. Using the testing functionality via the admin portal has sometimes required modifications to various manifest files or simply avoided all together. We have actually been using v2 build 19 in production for several months now and have been pleased with the stability. We have not had the same stability success with subsequent builds but are investigating upgrading with this latest build in hopes of using the new features while remaining stable.
- Darren Jones, USA
April 16 Winner:
The installer is pretty slick. The -console flag to the installer was a lifesaver too; my Solaris install is fairly cut down, and if I'd had to install X, I probably wouldn't have bothered. Having the installer spit out a run this to start, go here to log in to get straight to the web admin console is a great idea. Really helps the clueless among us. The admin UI feels nice and responsive even on my system (running in a zone on a 512-MB RAM Pentium 4). Links to the docs being right in the web console is a very good idea too. I wish you didn't have to use Sun Download Manager—I couldn't get the tools install as it pointed to https URLs that SDM didn't like. I didn't have time to wait for a fix, so I settled for the JDK-bundled version instead. SXCR doesn't need the SDM, and that is much easier to get hold of as a result. It's also very handy that GlassFish is a fairly unusual name—a quick Google found me: http://blogs.sun.com/bloggerkedar/entry/app_server_and_solaris_10, which explains how to get SMF and privileges working.
- Dick Davies, United Kingdom
April 2 Winner:
GlassFish V2 is a state-of-the art application server that allows for high-availability production systems in a clustered environment whilst maintaining a small footprint. It is not feature-bloated like some of the commercial offerings; a good example of this is the administrator console which has more configuration and options than the JBoss equivalent without being overly complex like the WebLogic equivalent. GlassFish does not impose proprietary features nor require a mass of configuration to deploy an application. It is standards and developer focused enabling ease-of-development, rather than implementing headline grabbing features, fancy graphs, and product tie-ins.
- Tim Davidson, United Kingdom
