(tested with HSQL, JavaDB config coming...)

• Download the latest GlassFish (currently v3.0.1) from here
• Donwload the exe for Windows or the shell script for Unix.
• Start GlassFish instance using $GLASSFISH_HOME/bin/asadmin start-domain
• Do you want to deploy from the web interface, or the commandline?
• Deploying from the web interface:
  • point browser tohttp://localhost:4848
  • log in as default administrator user admin with default password adminadmin
  • select Applications -> Web Applications -> Deploy in the left tree
  • select the XWiki WAR archive to deploy and set the context root to xwiki (anything else will make XWiki navigation break)
• Deploy from the commandline:
  • $GLASSFISH_HOME/bin/asadmin deploy --contextroot xwiki file.war
• enjoy XWiki from http://localhost:8080/xwiki

The complete GlassFish Documentation is here: https://glassfish.dev.java.net/docs/project.html

Configuring a MySQL datasource in Glassfish

• Download the MySQL jdbc driver from here
• Extract the contents of the file.
• Copy the jar file to GLASSFISH_HOME/glassfish/lib if you want it to be available to all Glassfish applications, or to the WEB-INF/lib dir of the xwiki deployment dir if you only want it to be locally available (example: GLASSFISH_HOME/glassfish/domains/domain1/applications/xwiki-enterprise-web-2.5-milestone-1/WEB-INF/lib).
• Start or restart the Glassfish server: bin/asadmin start-domain or bin/asadmin restart-domain

Now if you want to use the web interface to define a datasource, you can find useful info here.

If you want to use the command line interface to define a datasource, you can find useful info here.

The following is currently a work in progress.

Quick and dirty is easy:

• Create the connection pool: Assuming you did the MySQL stuff as explained here you have a MySQL database called 'xwiki' accessable by a user 'xwiki' with password 'xwiki'.
• asadmin create-jdbc-connection-pool --datasourceclassname com.mysql.jdbc.jdbc2.optional.MysqlConnectionPoolDataSource
  --restype javax.sql.ConnectionPoolDataSource --property "User=xwiki:Password=xwiki:URL=jdbc\\:mysql\\://localhost\\:3306/xwiki"
  jdbc/xwikipool
• This should give you Command create-jdbc-connection-pool executed successfully.
• If not, just execute bin/asadmin delete-jdbc-connection-pool jdbc/xwikipool and start again :-)
• Test the connection pool: asadmin ping-connection-pool jdbc/xwikipool 
• This should give you Command ping-connection-pool executed successfully.
• Create the JDBC resource: asadmin --user=admin create-jdbc-resource --connectionpoolid jdbc/xwikipool jdbc/xwiki
• Test the JDBC resource: asadmin --user admin list-jdbc-resources 
• This should result in:
  jdbc/__TimerPool
  jdbc/__default
  jdbc/arena
  jdbc/classifieds

Command list-jdbc-resources executed successfully.