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The GlassFish web services stack is now called Metro

Posted by haroldcarr on June 19, 2007 at 11:06 AM PDT

Giving names to software is always a difficult task. For example,
we refer to our implementation of advanced features such as atomic
transactions, reliable messaging and security (based on various WS-*
specifications that interoperate with MS Windows Communiations
Foundation, but also work Java to Java) as

Project Tango

But some people think that Tango
is a different stack than our


stack. But that is not the case. Tango is implemented on
of the JAX-WS RI. So, sometimes, to make this point in email
messages, we've been saying "JAX-WS RI + Tango".

There is also the problem that the term "RI" (i.e., Reference
Implementation) implies "not production quality" to some people. The
JAX-WS RI functions as an RI since Sun is the specification lead
on the JAX-WS specification. But our implementation is much
more than an RI. The JAX-WS RI is a full feature, high quality, high
performance web services stack in production use at many sites.

To emphasize that we have a single, high quality, high performance,
producation ready web services stack we have created

Project Metro.
Metro primarily consists of the JAX-WS RI as the base stack and
Tango as the implementation of WS-* based features (that interoperate
with WCF).

It takes time to make shifts such as this. The existing JAX-WS and
Tango sites will continue to exist, the Tango documentation will
continue to refer mostly to itself, etc. But over time we will align
the various pieces such that everything refers to Metro. The Metro
binary is essentially identical to the Tango binary (which includes
the JAX-WS RI), so following the Tango install instructions and
tutorial will work fine.

The immediate change you will notice is that we will now be
refering to our web services stack by the name Project

Metro is built into

GlassFish V2

It can also be downloaded and installed into other web containers. We
test it on Tomcat and we provide a Tomcat installer.

Welcome to Project Metro.

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