FishCAT testing for v3

Last week the latest installation of the FishCAT program came to an end. FishCAT is the GlassFish Community Acceptance Testing program, that is, a community program run by Sun to QA GF (in this case v3) that gets participants from around the globe ().

I like to join it each time for several selfish reasons. After all, Netbeans + Glassfish is my preferred development platform and if I'm going to use it extensively I want to ensure that it suits my needs. In addition, neither IWebMvc/IWebJTracker nor GMaps4JSF were working in GFv3 back at the start of the program. That, of course, forced me to use Tomcat as my main development server. Fortunately Glassfish shares code with Tomcat so having something working in the later means good news to solve the problem in the former.

The process is really simple, when you find an issue you post a message in the mailing list and after a preliminary revision you're asked to post a bug report in the tracker. Just this initial check was enough to fix the Gmasp4JSF issue (a bug with the application code that traversed the folder structure below /, a subtle difference with Tomcat which wouldn't complain and just set the path to /) so it's a crucial step. There's an obvious commitment with the project and an internal dev is immediately assigned to the issue and you can see steady progress right form the start.

Here's a brief list of pros:

• The people at Sun top the list without doubt. I haven't ever seem a team of such positive and passionate folks. Special thanks go to Judy Tang and Jan Luehe who were always helpful!


• The importance given to the bugs. FishCAT is not a PR project. Sun really wants external devs to participate and puts resources to fix the issues reported. Kudos to the company here. They really understand how to run this kind of activity.


• They helped me as much as I helped them. Yes, I reported several nasty bugs in the deployment and web container components but in the process I got advices and could fix several hidden issues of my applications as well. It was a clear win-win situation for all of us.


• GFv3 will be the first EE 6 implementation available and that's a feat worth some testing.


• Tens of developers from countries as different as Germany, China, South Africa, USA or Spain to mention some


• GMaps4JSF and IWebMVc will fully work in the final release of GFv3!

I have one con though:

• For God's sake, please upgrade the network infrastructure! And that twentieth century issue tracker as well! Some days just posting a bug was such an exasperating task..

All in all, a very positive interaction indeed. I hope to see some of you next year!