Java EE 7 and the Cloud theme continue to move full steam ahead. In a PaaS environment where infrastructure is shared and configuration tends to be split between the PaaS Provider (vendor or IT) and the PaaS user, security requires additional flexibility.

The SecuritEE blog covers Java EE security. The first two entries (here, here) begin to address Java EE 7 PaaS security.

If security is important to your Java EE applications, add the RSS feed to your reader.

Recent Tips and News on Java, Java EE 6, GlassFish & more :

• JVM: How to analyze Thread Dump (Pierre-Hugues Charbonneau)
• Seven NetBeans Hints for Modernizing Java Code (Dustin)
• Weblogic login module test - Firefox plugin to modify HTTP request header (Daniel Veselka)
• There is Safety in Numbers: How to Build Fail-Safe Clusters (Judah Jones)
• JSF 2.0 for the Cloud, Part One (OTN)
• An Introduction to OpenFaces, Part 2 – DataTable and TreeTable (Dmitry Pikhulya)
• If JAX-RS had an MVC framework? (Mamadou Lamine Ba)
• How to Integrate Glassfish with IIS (jstoup)
• OpenAM: Deploy on GlassFish v2 (Mark Craig)
• Context and Dependency Injection in Java EE 6 (Marakana)
• File realm & role based security with Glassfish 3.1 (Djordje)
• JBizMo (mganserer)
• JSF 2 Tip of the Day: JSF Page Redirection in PhaseListener (John Yeary)
• GLASSFISH - HEAPSIZE SETTINGS (Ralph)
• USING JUMPSTART IN GLASSFISH 2.1.1 (jumpstart)
• Securing JEE web applications on Glassfish with JAAS (Nabi Zamani)
• A Simple JSF Tutorial with PrimeFaces and JSON Object Parsing in Java (Gökhan Ozar)
• COUCHBASE MANAGER FOR GLASSFISH: MAIN IDEA BORN (rickyepoderi)

2012 Duke's Choice Award are open for nominations. These awards recognize and celebrate innovation in the Java platform.

Winners will be announced in the September 2012 issue of Java Magazine and on stage at JavaOne, San Francisco, 2012. They will receive a free JavaOne full conference pass and a Duke Award Statue.

For details on recent winners check out: 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011.

Nominations are open until Jun 15th, submit now!

Apache TomEE (pronounced "tommy") 1.0 is now released. Its basically vanilla Tomcat with Java EE 6 Web Profile features packaged together. This is the 15th certified Java EE 6 implementation and the certification is for the Java EE 6 Web Profile.

The tested configuration shows the list and version of technologies included in this release. The home page provide more details about the technologies and download link.

Congratulations David Blevins and rest of the TomEE team!

The GlassFish Server Embedded Guide documents how to run GlassFish in a JVM running another application, perhaps to expose that application's features using Web Services or a RESTful endpoint, or to leverage the EJB container for transactional business logic. Julien Ponge, however, has posted how he deployed a stock GlassFish installation on a stock BeagleBoard xM Embedded System with Java SE 6 Embedded.

While many are talking about scaling up Java EE in the cloud, Julien reminds us that scaling down Java EE can drive a lot of potential value as well!

Recent Tips and News on Java, Java EE 6, GlassFish & more :

• Transparently adding WebSockets to your application using SwaggerSocket (Jeanfrancois Arcand)
• HTTP Basic Auth in RESTful web service on GlassFish v3 using NetBeans tutorial (German) (Couchdb)
• Weld 2.0.0.Alpha2 released (Jozef Hartinger)
• Java EE 6 – It’s the small things. (Shane K Johnson)
• Using GlassFish and APEXListener as backend for Apache so server APEX (Ronald Rood)
• Auditing Entities With JPA Events (Andy Gibson)
• Windows Azure, the application to Java "Hello World" using JDK 1.6 and Glassfish 3 (Russian) (MSDN)
• Is there a way to fix the JPA EntityManager? (Mark Struberg)
• GLASSFISH - EJB TIMER SERVICE NOT AVAILABLE (Ralph)
• GlassFish-to-GlassFish Remote EJB Invocation (Cheng Fang)
• Basic Bean Building: How to Quickly Create a JSF Managed "Look-up" Bean (Mark Heckler)
• Java EE in the Cloud (Gordon Dickens)
• Persisting Enums in JPA 2.0 (Raphael Rodrigues)
• Simple RESTful services in Glassfish Pt 2 (Andy Gibson)
• Cache thoughts with JPA 2.0 (Raphael Rodrigues)
• JEE 6 (J2EE / Java EE) - Enterprise Java Training Course (jbi Training)

The Oracle Fusion Middleware Team is looking for talent to help build the future of the application stack. If you are interested, check out this job posting. Here's an extract :

"working with product management to define product features, creating system architectures, designing features, writing/testing code, fixing bugs, participating in JSR expert groups, leading inter-team projects, presenting at conferences.."

This is a job based in the Canada, Ottawa and has an option for a project lead role.

Apply today!

Java SE 7 U4 may sound like a normal patch release. But this is the first delivery of both the Java Development Kit (JDK) and JavaFX Software Development Kit (SDK) for Mac OS X by Oracle. The consumer version, including a JRE, will be released later this year.

NetBeans 7.1.2 provides support for the updated JDK. In this release, Ant is upgraded to 1.8.3 and it even has some minor performance improvements. Download it today!

This JDK release also contains G1 Garbage Collector that provides a predictable garbage collection even for very large Java applications. All the performance improves from Oracle JRockit have also been merged into Oracle Java Hotspot and OpenJDK. Several new features are available in Java FX 2.1 as well.

What is holding you back ? Download JDK 7 U4 and NetBeans 7.1.2.

As we constantly improve the java.net infrastructure you will experience downtime starting around noon pacific time (7pm UTC) on Friday, April 27, through noon pacific time (7pm UTC) on Monday, April 30 for scheduled maintenance.

Email aliases (*@*.java.net) for all projects hosted java.net will not be available. So users@glassfish, dev@glassfish, users@jersey, and other similar aliases will not be accessible, including their archives. The forums and downloads for these projects will not be accessible as well.

The GlassFish Update Center used to update your existing binaries will not be available. glassfish.org, which redirects to glassfish.java.net, and other project websites in *.java.net domain will not be accessible during the weekend.

The service will resume Monday Noon PT and we will post an update as services come back online. Thanks for your patience!

The Java EE 7 Platform Expert Group has released an Early Draft of the specification. The Appendix EE.B describe all the changes in this version. The associated Web Profile Early Draft is released as well and the Appendix WP.A.1 describe the changes from previous versions.

Following the JCP 2.8 transparency rules, the progress can be monitored at javaee-spec.java.net and feedback provided at users@javaee-spec.

The following individual components have also released their Early Drafts:

• Expression Language 3.0 (JSR 341)
• Java Message Service 2.0 (JSR 343)
• Enterprise JavaBeans 3.2 (JSR 345)
• Contexts and Dependency Injection 1.1 (JSR 346)
• Bean Validation 1.1 (JSR 349)
• JavaServer Faces 2.2 (JSR 344)
• Java Persistence API 2.1 (JSR 338)
• Java API for RESTful Services 2.0 (JSR 339)

David Heffelfinger's 4-part article series on Spring to Java EE 6 migration published the last part. The part 1, part 2 and part 3 takes a sample Spring application and builds it using java EE 6. It even compares the generated WAR files and LoC in XML configuration in the two environments.

Here are some other blogs/articles that cover the topic:

• Migrating Spring Applications to Java EE 6 – Part 1 by Bert Ertman and Paul Bakker
• Java EE wins over Spring by Bill Burke
  
• Why will I use Java EE instead of Spring in new Enterprise Java projects in 2012 ? by Kai Waehner (more discussion on TSS)
  
• Spring to Java EE migration (Part 1 and 2, 3 and 4 coming as well) by David Heffelfinger
  
• Spring to Java EE - A Migration Experience by Lincoln Baxter
  
• Migrating Spring to Java EE 6 by Bert Ertman and Paul Bakker at NLJUG
• Moving from Spring to Java EE 6 - The Age of Frameworks is Over at TSS
• Java EE vs Spring Shootout by Rohit Kelapure and Reza Rehman at JavaOne 2011
• Java EE 6 and the Ewoks by Murat Yener
• Definite excuse to avoid Spring forever - Bert Ertman and Arun Gupta
  

What are you reasons for migrating from Spring to Java EE 6 ? Let us know.

While this is not the first post on Server Side Events,  Bhakti and Jitu continue the discussion of using Server-Side Events (SSE) as HTML 5, Java EE 7, and GlassFish Server move full steam ahead.

The blog posts include example source code that can be deployed to recent (trunk) builds of GlassFish Server.  Bhakti uses SSE and CDI to build an application that tracks a twitter search, while Jitu discusses how GlassFish adds a bit more abstraction for the developer and references a video player sample application available in the GlassFish trunk.

Expression Language (EL) has been a separate specification since JSP 2.0 but still part of the same JSR. The JSR 341 places EL in a separate specification. The Expert Group released Expression Language 3.0 Early Draft is now posted for a formal review.

Some of the main goals of the JSR are to separate ELContext into parsing and evaluation contexts, adding operators like equality, string concatenation, etc, and integration with CDI such as generating events before/during/after the expressions are evaluated.

Download the Early Draft and and follow the updates at el-spec.java.net. For more information about EL 3.0 (JSR 341), check out the JSR project on java.net. The archives of EG discussion are available at jsr341-experts and you can subscribe to the users@el-spec and other aliases on the Mailing Lists page.

Recent Tips and News on Java, Java EE 6, GlassFish & more :

• Using Java Persistence API for Java SE 7 Desktop applications in NetBeans 7 (Oracle Learning Library)
• Use jBPM5 embedded within a Java EE 6 application (akquinet)
• If JAX-RS had an MVC framework? (Mamadou Lamine Ba)
• Java EE Revisits Design Patterns: Observer (Nikos Maravitsas)
• Detailed Logging Output with GlassFish Server, Hibernate, and Log4j (wikis.oracle.com)
• Grizzly 2.2.5 has been released! (Ryan Lubke)
• Glassfish : Installing and Configuring it to connect database (MYSQL) Part - 1 (Srirmpack)
• Persisting Enums in JPA 2.0 (Raphael Rodrigues)
• Basic Bean Building: How to Quickly Create a JSF Managed "Look-up" Bean (Mark Heckler)
• Cache thoughts with JPA 2.0 (Raphael Rodrigues)
• Install GlassFish 3.1 on CentOS or RHEL (DiAbOlIkO)
• Bug fix for Eclipse runtime plugin (Peter Benedikovic )
• JPA: Dynamic search builder, the power of annotation, reflection and generics. (Mohamed Taman)
• Spring and GlassFish JMS (René van Wijk)

Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs) have come a long way in since J2EE 1.4.  Beginning with Java EE 5, building transactional, secure, message-oriented, and persistence-aware business components has become significantly simpler. EJBs have become annotated Java objects, where  annotations enhance the features of the POJO thanks to integrated JSRs like EJB 3.1, Bean Validation, Interceptors, Contexts and Dependency Injection, Expression Language, JAX-RS Java Persistence Architecture, and more.  Let's not forget convention over configuration!

Thanks to some "house cleaning", Container Managed Persistence (CMP) and Bean Managed Persistence (BMP) have been deprecated.  While still supported in Java EE 6, vendors have the option of not supporting BMP/CMP in the future Java EE 7 release.  If your applications use BMP/CMP, it is time to investigate the much simpler Java EE 6 programming model! Along these lines, here are some resources to help you out.

Cheng Fang has a post on remote EJB invocation using GlassFish, where one EJB can invoke another EJB across JVMs. This is a recommended read if you are building distributed applications or integrating multiple business systems.

Learning about EJBs is as easy as picking up the Java EE 6 Tutorial, the EJB 3.1 Cookbook, or Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1.  More generically, check out Adam Bien's books on Java EE, which cover EJBs as well.