Java News from Saturday, November 13, 2004

Sun's released a pure Java MP3 playing plugin for JavaSound and the Java Media Framework. I haven't tried it yet myself, but the initial reports are not promising. It appears to have some major installation issues.

The Apache Project has posted the third milestone release of Geronimo, their open source J2EE application server. "The aim of the project is to produce a large and healthy community of J2EE developers tasked with the development of an open source, certified J2EE server, that is ASF licensed and passes Sun's TCK reusing the best ASF/BSD licensed code available today and adding new code to complete the J2EE stack." According to the release notes, significant changes since the second milestone release are:

• CMP Entity beans are now supported. However, there are still significant limitations (no EJB QL support). This is one of the last outstanding core J2EE features.
• Geronimo security realms have been integrated with the J2EE containers, so J2EE container-managed authentication works.
• The web container now supports HTTPS with configurable SSL certificates, etc.
• The transaction system is more robust, with bug fixes, transaction log support, etc.
• An application client container is now included with Geronimo
• Configuration changes to core Geronimo services and running applications are persisted, though we still lack a user-friendly interface for making such changes.
• Manifest Class-Path entries in J2EE application modules are supported.
• JDBC database pools and JMS connection factories, topics, and queues are now fully supported "out of the box".
• When deploying a J2EE connector, multiple instances of the same resource adapter can be declared in the same deployment plan.
• The command-line deployment tool supports authentication and hot deployment to a running server.
• JAX-RPC and SAAJ features are available to applications acting as Web Services clients (though Web Services server features are not yet available)

Also according to the release notes, significant missing features currently include:

• Full EJB CMP support with EJB QL
• Message-Driven Beans support for JMS (currently present but buggy in comparison to non-JMS message sources)
• A good management tool, capable of reconfiguring the core Geronimo services (such as setting a different default transaction timeout, changing default security realm, changing web container listen port, etc.)
• A complete JSR-77 implementation, including the Management EJB
• A complete JSR-88 configuration and deployment tool
• JSR-88 support for Geronimo deployment plan configuration
• Web Services server features and required J2EE features
• Fully integrate Tomcat as an alternative to Jetty as the web container
• Full functionality on non-Sun JVMs
• Support for CORBA interoperability and distribution
• Deployment tools should work from remote machines
• Application client container should work from remote machines
• Support for general JDBC XA drivers, and product-specific JDBC enhancements
• Better features for migrating application and service configurations between different Geronimo servers
• Ant tasks for common tasks (deployment, etc.)

Java 1.4 or later is required.