Up 
As I mentioned in a recent post, we’re investigating some changes to the GlassFish v3 Administration Console. We finally have something fairly concrete to show, and have set up a demo site for you to play with. Ken Pauslen sent an email regarding our demo to the GlassFish users’ list, so instead of repeating all of that, I’ll simply quote his email for you below. Note the comment on performance toward the end. 
Please send feedback to the webtier list or the dev list. Many thanks!
Hi everyone,
The GlassFish admin console team has been working hard on ways to simplify our development, while at the same time attempting to improve the experience of using the console. We have created a prototype which shows a couple different designs we are considering… we’d like your feedback on what you think of it. Here’s how you can help:
- Try the working prototype at: http://63.227.208.233:9999/admingui/
- Respond to this email or to my blog that I am about to write about this (http://blogs.sun.com/paulsen). I think Jason and Anissa will probably write too (http://blogs.steeplesoft.com/ or http://blogs.sun.com/anilam/).
Here are some things we are particularly interested in feedback on:
- Do you like/dislike the menus?
- Do you like/dislike the tree?
- Do you like/dislike the tagging feature?
Of course all other comments are also welcome (what’s missing? what do you really like? what do you dislike? etc.). We know there are many issues with this UI, it is an early prototype — far from production ready. Some major issues we’re aware of:
- Many broken button clicks (particularly posts that don’t do a redirect)
- Performance — it’s not good right now, it will be MUCH better when it’s not a prototype (note: it also doesn’t help that this prototype is running on a small desktop machine over a DSL-line…
).
- Many pages are broken (some intentionally for the public demo, others are simply not implemented)
- List of tagged pages can sometimes show duplicates
- Ajax for updating tags and other portions of the screen is not implemented
- Breadcrumbs do not exist
So… as you can see we’re not looking for bugs, but rather general feedback on the navigation and L&F. Thanks for taking a look!
Thanks,
Ken Paulsen (and the rest of the GF Admin Console Team)
Popularity: 9% [?]
I prefer the tree view since you can see more options at a time without needing to hover over it to expand options (like you have to with the menu). I will say that the tree view wasn’t perfect, though — when I clicked on Connection Pools under JDBC, it goes to the connection pools page, but the tree was collapsed at JDBC (so did not show my current location until expanded). It should at least expand area of the tree representing the section of the admin console that you’re inside.
The tagging feature… not a big fan. It just seems like extra clutter, and I can’t think of a reason why I’d want to use it.
Breadcrumbs will be nice when you get to em.