Glassfish
I decided to take advantage of the plethora of Glassfish sessions as I wasn't planning on attending many during JavaOne. I think Glassfish has come a long way and is really now much more than just the JEE5 reference implementation. Glassfish V2 now supports many of the features you would expect in an enterprise scale app server such as clustering etc. This version of Glassfish is starting to see some serious production deployments on it, for example wotif.com (Top Australian travel site).
Now all of that is not very interesting but Glassfish V3 is. V3 is a complete rewrite using a micro-kernel design they call HK2 (Hundred K kernel). Trust Sun to make it sound like this is something new, were in fact this is exactly what JBoss having been doing for about 8 years with their JMX Kernel that their app server is built-on. What V3 has is start on-demand services so the core container starts very quickly and will only start others services when they are needed. The demo shown was an app written in JRuby that was deployed to V3. V3 then downloaded and started the JRuby runtime then started the app. One interesting outcome of the micro-kernel design is the ability to embedd Glassfish in unit tests or making standalone web-applications they way that Hudson uses jetty.
Javaposse
Dick, Carl, Tor and Joe (aka The JavaPosse) made an appearance at CommunityOne and they recorded an episode of their podcast (Episode 185). Gotta love those hats, It's great to see these guys live. I've listened to pretty much every episode and although at times they talk crap or talk about Java IDE's to much but it's a good way to keep up with what's going on in the Java space.
This was my first CommunityOne event as last year I went to the Java University event. It was really just a Sun Marketing event for all their other Open Source initiatives, this really isn't a bad thing. It's a good event for all the people involved in these communities to come together in one place especially those not focused on Java technologies.
I'll be back next year......