Useful things I've discovered about Glassfish (especially embedded glassfish) lately

I've been working with / struggling with Glassfish a lot lately. The documentation leaves much to be desired, so there are a few bits and pieces you might not know that might come in handy.

These notes refer to Glassfish 3.1.

JavaServer Faces (JSF2) and JAX-RS don't play well together

I've been working with JavaServer Faces 2 (JSF2) since shortly after its release, and it continues to be an annoying mix of excellent and frustrating to work with. It's theoretically a great technology, especially with CDI (contexts and dependency injection) even despite the holes and quirks in the spec. There are just two wee problems.

First, unlike many of the other EE specs, the JSF2 spec really isn't written to be useful for developers intending to use JSF2 in their apps. It's very much a specification not a reference, and I found it hard to read even as a specification. Because I was getting started with JSF2 in the very early days of EE 6, I seem to remember that the now very helpful Java EE Tutorial wasn't EE6 ready yet or was incomplete, so I didn't have that as a basis for learning JSF2 and EE6 either. Perhaps my memory is just failing me. In any case, I often landed up stumbling through Google-land trying to find out details that I thought should be obvious and easy to find in the spec or other reference documentation. At the time, Google-land was full of outdated references to JSF 1, lots of migration guides from Spring to EE 6, and plenty of other things to side-track a confused newbie. All in all, it was really hard to get going with JSF2 alone.

Second, the JSF2 spec was clearly concocted with no thought of or co-operation with the JAX-RS spec, and it shows. They don't work well together, and it's really, really frustrating because they should be so useful in combination.

Edit: Part of the issue here appears to be that I was trying to use JSF2 just for the Facelets templating language, expecting to be able to interoperate with JAX-RS where possible. JSF2 is a framework and doesn't isn't really designed to enable you to easily step outside the abstractions imposed by the framework - not least because you shouldn't need to. I was probably going about this the wrong way in a square-peg, round-hole kind of way, and shouldn't have been trying to use JSF2 in the first place. That's not made particularly obvious by the docs, though.

File upload webapp

I recently became frustrated with the lack of easily self-hosted file upload app options. I needed to replace my employer's reliance on giant email attachments with something that wouldn't melt our mail server - and our clients could still understand how to use. This unfortunately ruled out the classic options like anonymous FTP.

In the end I wrote a new web application to accept files from clients over http and save them to a shared folder on the internal network. Many of the building blocks like uploadify were available, but there wasn't much around in terms of complete applications to do the job. Instead, people seemed to be using services like YouSendIt, Box.net, DropSend, etc ... which have downsides including:

• Inability to provide a canned recipient list, or high per-user per-month fees to support one
• Inability to customise the site's appearance and integrate it into your domain - without paying high fees for an "enterprise" version
• The need to download files once the client has sent them to the provider, often one-by-one via a clumsy web interface
• Windows-only client applications required to do batch downloads of files. Some services have Mac versions, but only one had a Linux client suitable for our advertising thin clients.
• Lack of a web services API - unless you pay high fees for the "enterprise" version.
• Lack of no-flash fallback upload methods
• Sometimes iffy browser compatibility

I wanted something really simple for clients - and staff - to use, that simply dropped files into a shared folder as they were uploaded and sent a notification email to staff when the upload was finished. Now that I've finished it, I'm releasing the result as open source software for the use of anybody who wants it. You can get it here:

https://github.com/ringerc/postupload

It's a Java EE 6 project that runs on Glassfish. Don't stress if you've never used any of that before, if you only know PHP, etc. The client-side is all familiar HTML and JavaScript, and the server side isn't especially complicated code. Detailed instructions for installing and running Glassfish are provided.