It was a very eventful quarter with the completion of certification work, release, and JavaOne announcement of TomEE.

Certification

Steady progress on TCK work was made all through August and September with the hopes of maybe making it in time for a JavaOne certification announcement. First 100% pass completed on the 22nd. Last major bits revolved around @DataSourceDefinition support, CDI integration, global JNDI support and the standard two dozen "picky" things some of which involved patching jars.

Release and Announcement

Release preparation started shortly after as did work on an announcement. Primary release work involved splitting the TomEE distro into two parts and cleaning up legal files. For certification purposes, any uncertified parts beyond the web profile had to be split into a separate download that could be clearly marked as not certified. Legal work was also quite involved as it had been a year since the trunk code had been released. Typically, releases have taken 2-3 weeks due to discovering issues with LICENSE and NOTICE files of the zips and tar.gz. To aid in the legal screening and speed up release time in a healthy way, a tool was created to make it easier to inspect the zip contents and all NOTICE and LICENSE files in all jars inside said zip. The tool is being moved into the RAT project and will be called "Tentacles."

The release announcement was drafted up by Sally with the help of myself and others. The plan was to announce the Thursday of JavaOne, but that date was moved up 2 days when Oracle placed TomEE on the certification page Monday night. By Tuesday morning word had already broken on twitter, some of which had people posting links to snapshots, so the announcement was moved up to tuesday thanks to some agility on Sally's part and the release binaries were finalized.

TomEE was featured prominently at JavaOne in a session on thursday that week. The session was standing room only and went quite well. I participated in two interviews about TomEE 23. Aside from one of them naming me "project lead", they represent the ASF values nicely. The interviewer's usage of "project lead" usage was an oversight on my part, one which will not slip by uncorrected so easily again.

Future public events

TomEE will be presented by members of the community in the near future. Jacek Laskowski at Warsjawa 2011, Jonathan Gallimore at JAXLondon in November, and myself at ApacheCon also in November. The community has been sharing all slides from all presentations given this year via the project svn which has been quite nice in helping others reuse the materials for the benefit of the project.

Current Activities

Immediately post release, work has been focused on completing the Arquillian adapter for TomEE, improving the Embeddable functionality, and refactoring the code to make it clearer what we consider "OpenEJB" and what is "TomEE." The two have been one indistinguishable codebase as the roots of TomEE is simply "the OpenEJB/Tomcat integration" code renamed and certified. Renaming that code TomEE has been a boon in helping people understand what it does in a way they can also communicate to others, but it is a bit of a mess as TomEE is looking like it could easily become the dominant identity. The two, "OpenEJB" and "TomEE", will likely remain as part of the same build and codeline for the foreseeable future, but work as started on giving TomEE more of its own identity in code terms.

Much work remains to be done on TomEE Plus, the flavor of TomEE where the uncertified JMS, JAX-RS, JAX-WS and Java EE Connector functionality lives. There is desire to certify this as well, though, that will likely be months off.

1 https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the_apache_software_foundation_announces17
2 http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/apache-tomee-web-stack-gains-approval-175341
3 http://jaxenter.com/tomee-be-small-be-certified-be-tomcat-38434.html

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