Jane Young points out an unusual usability feature in Glassfish, in "Finding CLI commands in GlassFish is now easier and better." Glassfish' command-line utility now does regex searches and finds closest matches to what admins type in, in case they don't remember every command. No word on whether it can tell when the user is selecting the wrong command instead of mistyping one's name. (Let's hope they don't apply the same logic to passwords, too, but that's being silly.) However, the focus on user friendliness on the part of an application server is unusual; most application servers focus on speed or functionality, with usability features coming far behind. Good job on the feature, for one who has to remember far too many commands as it is. Having this for one application server makes that server easier to migrate to. (In all fairness, it should be noted that Geronimo also has an excellent user experience, through its web console.)

Good idea, it's about time people started paying attention to this side of things. The latest version of WebLogic has an absolutely appalling console: very hard to work with. Of course, this being the JEE world, lots of people will now leap forward saying things like "Well, of course all the script kiddies want it to work like VB... but Java developers don't need that sort of thing because we're real programmers, and we know that helpful interfaces are for wimps; real men hack together gigabytes of XML and do it all with ant".

Good idea, it's about time people started paying attention to this side of things. The latest version of WebLogic has an absolutely appalling console: very hard to work with.

Of course, this being the JEE world, lots of people will now leap forward saying things like "Well, of course all the script kiddies want it to work like VB... but Java developers don't need that sort of thing because we're real programmers, and we know that helpful interfaces are for wimps; real men hack together gigabytes of XML and do it all with ant".

What things specifically do you have problems with in the console? Thanks, Mike Jasnowski BEA Systems

GlassFish User Experience team is having weekly community meetings with a goal of improving overall user experience of GlassFish. The meetings are open to public. Please join us! Meeting details and presentations are available at the UE Wiki: http://www.glassfishwiki.org/gfwiki/Wiki.jsp?page=UserExperienceMeeting --Nazrul

I don't care since my IDE and build environment takes care of this.

It's not about building and development. It's about maintenance and support once the application hits QC and production. Most of the attention has gone into making it easy to build and deploy in a development environment. But for the people who actually have to support and maintain these applications running live, it's hard work and there aren't that many nice tools to help them do it.

It's not about building and development. It's about maintenance and support once the application hits QC and production.

Most of the attention has gone into making it easy to build and deploy in a development environment. But for the people who actually have to support and maintain these applications running live, it's hard work and there aren't that many nice tools to help them do it.

What would you envision to be your ideal management tool/toolest if you could have it? Mike Jasnowski BEA Systems