Sun Releases New GlassFish Preview

In addition to Java EE 6 preview features and production support for lightweight Web tier applications, the new GlassFish v3 Prelude provides dynamic language support with reliable performance, an easy-to-use administration console and rapid deployment technology. Hinz said the new GlassFish allows users to run development languages like Java, Groovy on Grails and JRuby on Rails at the same time without sacrificing performance. Also, JRuby applications can run without the Java servlet container, improving productivity by eliminating the need to bundle and deploy JRuby applications as a Java Web archive.

Meanwhile, Clingan said developers can expect to be more productive when GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 Prelude is combined with the upcoming release of NetBeans integrated development environment (IDE) 6.5.

Jonathan Eunice, an analyst with Illuminata, said GlassFish v3 Prelude has several things that stand out, including a great development cycle. He said it also has strong tie-ins with development tools: NetBeans and Eclipse, and "v3 Prelude is an excellent drop-in replacement for Apache Tomcat. Not a Java EE server (either EE 5 or 6), but for code that doesn’t need full EE support, good stuff."

“GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 Prelude is a great example of the innovations that a dynamic, open-source community can create as well as an interesting view into the future of Web application development and production environments,” said Karen Tegan Padir, vice president of engineering, Software Infrastructure, Sun Microsystems. “This release, which is fully supported by Sun and targeted at Web-tier production environments, will be the basis for the GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 -- a complete application server based on the OSGi standard and the upcoming Java EE 6 platform.” 

Sun said more than 100 companies have joined the Sun Partner Advantage Program, which connects GlassFish solution providers to the GlassFish user and developer community. New additions to the community include companies such as CloudAPPy Drag and Drop Cloud Hosting, ehCache, Imixs, JasperSoft, Nuxeo, and planConnect. 

"GlassFish is showing extraordinary feature and performance maturity in the very competitive application server space and is growing to become a major new force in the market,” said Jose Morales, vice president, Business Development, Jaspersoft, in a statement. “Jaspersoft is pleased to add GlassFish Enterprise Server support to our family of supported Sun products, including the Solaris Operating System, NetBeans IDE and MySQL database."

"We have been impressed by the GlassFish v3 architecture," Eric Barroca, executive vice president, Operations, Nuxeo. “We have selected it to power Nuxeo WebEngine standalone server, our content-centric Web framework for building Web 2.0 applications, thanks to its OSGi support and its great ability to be embedded. We are looking forward to the full Java EE 6 support and plan to use it as our main application server for the open source ECM platform: Nuxeo EP."

To download and sign up for an annual subscription of the GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 Prelude, visit: http://www.sun.com/GlassFishv3. To find out more about the Sun Partner Advantage Program for GlassFish, visit: http://www.sun.com/software/products/appsrvr/gf-isv.jsp.