I have gathered some first stats for the IzPack-based GlassFish installer.

The installer was officially released on december 20th and has been downloaded 997 times from the release until december 31st from both izpack.org and free.fr.

There will be an update of the installer at some point with Solaris support (x86 and sparc) as well as some little enhancements.

During the christmas break, I took an hour or so to play with Groovy and EJBs. EJB 3 are very easy to use (especially compared to what they used to be before that) so I decided to investigate how I could make them even simpler to use with Groovy.

Indeed, Groovy shares mostly the same meta-model as Java and you can easily mix Java and Groovy code in the same project (actually you can put .java and .groovy files side-by-side in your packages).

I opted for a simple hello-word style of project using Groovy 1.5 and GlassFish v2 ur1.

I started with a single HelloEJB.groovy file to host both the EJB remote interface and implementation as a stateless session bean:

package ejb
 
import javax.ejb.Remote
import javax.ejb.Stateless
 
@Remote
interface HelloRemote
{
    String hello()
}
 
@Stateless
class HelloEJB implements HelloRemote
{
    String hello()
    {
        return "Hello world!"
    }
}

The Groovy compiler takes care of generating 2 .class files (one for the interface and one for the class). Nice

Then I packaged this inside an EAR having groovy-all-1.5.jar so that GlassFish could make the Groovy runtime available to the EJB. Then I wrote this simple remote client to test it:

import javax.naming.InitialContext
 
def ctx = new InitialContext()
def ejb = ctx.lookup("ejb.HelloRemote")
 
println ejb.hello()

For this client to work, you need to put appserv-rt.jar from GlassFish in your classpath. Also, you will need to tweak a jndi.properties file at the root of your client classpath if you are not using the default GlassFish ports for your target domain.

I guess I can now save quite a lot of time using Groovy to implement EJBs

Disclaimer: I am dynamic-languages agnostic as I use Python, Ruby and Groovy for various things and I like them all. Really!