Over at Sun’s Java site, there’s a lot of attention on Glassfish, in particular with it v3 release. The Glassfish v3 Technology Preview 2 gives an early look at what’s to come.
What is Glassfish? It’s a new application server for Jave Enterprise Edition platofmr, based on source code by Sun and Oracle’s TopLink Persistence system, which uses uses a relational database to store Java objects for persistence. Glassfish uses a derivative of Apache Tomcat as servlet container, but incorporates the Grizzly Java NIO (a collection of Java APIs for intensive I/O operations) for scalability and speed.
While it doesn’t qualify as an open source solution, IBM’s Lotus Notes/Domino gets some space today because of a lively discussion over at Slashdot concerning the products push against Microsoft. Recently announced Domino Express Licensing and Notes 8 places the price at $100 per user. That may still a hefty price for many small businesses, but for some companies that require a robust commercial messaging solution and with the budget to match may find something in it for them.
From the IBM information page:
IBM Lotus Domino Messaging Express software combines full support for
the latest Internet mail standards with the industry-leading messaging,
calendar and scheduling, discussion database and reference database
capabilities of Lotus Domino software - all in one manageable and
reliable package.
Lotus Domino Messaging Express includes a restricted license of Lotus
Domino Messaging Server that removes selected capabilities designed for
larger enterprises. You are entitled to use it on as many machines
within your company as you would like, but access is limited to those
users for which you have paid the per user charge.
ComputerWorld has an article that looks at the new Notes 8.
Ubuntu 8.04, also known as Hardy Heron, was released just last Friday. This is a significant milestone for the operating system as it marks another Long-Term Support version, the last one being Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. LTS means that the product will be supported for five years, a basic requirement for enterprise software.
New additions to the stock Ubuntu package include Kernel-based Virtual Machines for Intel and AMD processors with virtualization capabilities, built-in firewall, granular security policy, Firefox 3, Brasero (an improved CD-burning application), an improved Totem player (with YouTube and digital video broadcast support) and Inkscape.
To download the latest Ubuntu version quickly, visit the releases page.
BitRock InstallBuilder, currently at version 5.4.6, allows you to create multiplatform installers for Linux (x86/PPC/s390/x86_64/Itanium), Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris (x86/Sparc), IRIX, AIX, and HP-UX applications. The generated application installers have a native look-and-feel and no external dependencies, and can be run in GUI, text, and unattended modes. In addition to self-contained installers, the installation tool is also able to generate standalone RPM packages.
The latest version features improved file copying speed on Unix, the ability to pass installation variables from the command line, and comment preservation in XML.
Crow Designer is a GUI builder for the GTK+ toolkit. It is an IDE-embeddable RAD tool designed to fulfill the needs of desktop programmers who want to create multi-platform GTK+ based applications with minimal GUI coding. The project is targeted to develop a tool that is coherent and productive for experienced GTK+ users as well as simple and accessible for newcomers.
Crow Designer 2.11.3 was just released recently.
Bad news about MySQL: Sun has announced that it will close-source portions of the code. Affected will be features pertaining to online backups in MySQL Enterprise, the commercial version of the database.
This decision, I believe, has much to do with the need to distinguish between the free Community version and the commercial Enterprise edition of MySQL. Sun will develop new features for MySQL Enterprise 6.0 without making them available in MySQL Community.
Before you hit the panic button, it’s important to reiterate the context of this announcement: it only affects the commercial MySQL Enterprise edition, and not the arguably more popular free version. It’s still bad news because it removes a feature important to mission-critical applications from general circulation. However, I hazard that it won’t take long before community-developed alternatives come into play and possibly supplant the commercial offering.
An article by CIO.com outlines the expected improvements with the next release of MySQL, version 5.1. Sun Claims Big Leap with MySQL Upgrade Next Week says that Sun Microsystems, which bought MySQL AB, will use its upcoming MySQL conference to release 5.1.
MySQL 5.1 promises some major features. Among the advances are partitioning, events scheduling, row-based replication, and disk-based clustering. According to the article, these are features found in commercial offerings like DB2 and Oracle.
Another improvement is Maria, a transactional engine for MySQL.
