The Mind Electric is pleased to announce the availability of GLUE 3.0, the latest release of its popular web services platform. GLUE 3.0 seamlessly integrates the three most popular Java technologies - servlets, JSPs and web services – into a single, fast, easy-to-use package.

GLUE can be used standalone or within any J2EE container, minimizing the incremental expense for enterprises already using application servers.

A minimal learning curve combined with a lightweight, elegant design has made GLUE popular within the Java community. GLUE has been downloaded over 20,000 times since August, 2001, and the TME interest group has over 1,500 registered developers.

GLUE standard is free for most commercial uses. GLUE professional includes additional features such as asynchronous messaging via JMS, the ability to expose any EJB as a web service, integration with enterprise security systems via JAAS, a high-performance UDDI server, and professional support.

Here are some useful links:

Download area: http://www.themindelectric.net/download

GLUE home page: http://www.themindelectric.com/glue/index.html

TME interest group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MindElectricTechnology

Latest article on GLUE: http://www.sdtimes.com/news/059/story5.htm

It's refreshing to see someone successfully take something that is inherently complex (Web Services) and wrap it in a _simple_ interface (Glue). Hopefully more people will recognize the benefits of this approach.

GLUE is indeed a simple and elegant framework with an excellent documentation/tutorial. With Webservices becoming part of the J2EE specs, what role frameworks like GLUE will play in the future?

Sam-

Currently Glue differentiates itself from other Java Web Services implementations by its simplicity and speed. You are right though that as Web Services are more tightly integrated into J2EE, these protocol stacks (XML/SOAP/WSDL) will become commodity products, much like TCP/IP is now.

In the future The Mind Electic (maker of Glue) is looking to extend their Web Services offerings to include clustering, load-balancing and fail-over using a next generation Service Oriented Architecture based on grid computing concepts. I've seen a demo of these features in action and it looks quite compelling. Of course they also have several bells and whistles built into a current version of the Professional edition (JMS/EJB integration, JAAS, etc.), it seems like Grid Services are is the eventual goal of the company.

By the way, although Glue is not open source, the standard version is free for most uses.

hope that helps some,

harris

p.s. I am not a TME employee but work a good bit with their software and keep a close eye on the web services market in general.

I wonder whether GLUE could be used together with other JSP/Servlet engines, e.g. I would like to add web services, but I could use Resin or Tomcat - and it would be nice if I could just place some JAR's and configuration files.

GLUE can be used with other JSP/Servlet engines easily. I have tested GLUE 3.0 with Resin 2.1.2/2.1.4 and Tomcat 4.0.4/4.1.8.

Just mount the GLUE servlet electric.server.http.ServletServer to e.g. /glue/* to be able to access your service at http://yourServer:yourPort/glue/yourService.wsdl.

Regards,
Juergen

Congrats, Graham! Keep it up!