Hi,
Here is my 2 cents to the features I'd like to see in GlassFish:
- Better Web-front-end: Like a few others have said, I'd prefer to have the web-front-end do more to spare me the need to install apache beside it. The integration of the load balancer would then be much easier. I also would like to have an integrated reverse proxy to hide the complexity of my server instances behind an omogenous screen name.
- Better provider help: Being able to create a plan jar for a given EAR or WAR (sometimes, we get it without bindings and extensions and don't have the right to change the artifacts) would be helpfull. Change of the bindings in the admin console. Application versioning (also mentioned before) for a fallback scenario.
- Different admin Roles: Also mentioned before. I'd like a "read only" user, a user that can only stop/start servers and one that can do everything but change the configurations (beside the admin of course).
- Intelligent Servers: I know this one is a big step, but I think it would be really helpfull and something I haven't seen around (IBM is trying, but it's not really working all that well). I would like to define a dynamic plattform as a set of node agents and some runtime rules. This will create a cluster with a defined number of instances (defined in the rules as the minimum). The system will have a feedback mechanism that, based on the rules, will create or destroy instances and install the application on them at run time to allow peaks to be dynamically handled (by having more servers online) and unneeded resources saved (by removing or stopping the servers). Of course, some kind of monitoring functions should be implemented to watch over the system.
- Singelton Service: I haven't found out if the HA Manager can do that or not, but I would like to defines Services (timers, batches, applications) that are running on exactly one server at a time (this is very usefull for pub/sub applications where you only want one MDB to catch the message and process it and can't have a point to point because your JEE apps is not the only one listening in). The problem of having only one instance is that it cannot run as a 24/7 service (Single Point Of Failure) and the HA Manager should be able to "take it under it's wing" and control that, if the server instance it is running on is down, a new server instance is started. That way, you could create High available singelton services.
- Component Installation: If some of the things spoken about in the Forums and Feature request are implemented in GlassFish v3, the whole thing will get a lot bigger and more complex. As not everyone will want to use everything (we are currently not using the JBI part, that will come later) I would like the installation to be more component based. There should be a new profile "expert" where you can define which component to install and which should not be. By that I don't mean it should be removed if it is used internally (like the JMS component) but that the administrator shouldn't be able to configure it and an application shouldn't be able to be deployed if it needs a component that is not installed. This would make the GFv3 instances more managable (and won't require a very expensive group of expert to do the runtime part, only the engineering part).
That's about it :D
greets
jeremie
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