Sun Microsystems and the GlassFish community have released Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3, which they described as "the latest release of Sun's commercial Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application server and its open-source counterpart, GlassFish v3."

Sun's news release continued, "Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 is the industry's first application server to support the new Java Platform Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6)." Moreover, it said, "GlassFish is the industry's most downloaded Java EE-compatible application server, with more over 24 million downloads to date. Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 provides customers with an enterprise-grade, open-source-based application server solution focused on reducing application and deployment complexity. [Developers can] download and begin development with Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 today at: http://www.sun.com/glassfishv3."

In Java EE 6 Sun introduces a "new, lightweight Web Profile, in addition to the full enterprise platform ... With Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3, organizations can create and deploy modern Web applications with the Java EE 6 Web Profile and easily leverage the power of the full Java EE 6 platform for enterprise applications. Developers also benefit from the simplified programming model and productivity improvements offered by Java EE 6."

Kevin Schmidt, director of product management and marketing for Sun's Application Platform organization, said the Java EE 6 Web Profile enables developers to use a platform optimized for Web applications. Tom Kincaid, executive director of the Application Platform organization, said, "Developers can start with the Web Profile and grow to the entire platform as their needs grow."

"In addition to delivering the tremendous enhancements available in Java EE 6, Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 provides features to help improve start-up time and reduce resource utilization, plus fine-grained monitoring capabilities that offer improved observability for both developers and IT operators," Karen Tegan Padir, vice president of MySQL and Software Infrastructure at Sun, said in a statement. "People should think of GlassFish v3 as a pluggable run-time that can host many types of containers and enable rapid, iterative development with multiple programming languages—allowing customers to consolidate to a single platform [and] run-time. Because Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 is based on open-source technology, customers have more control over their product deployments and don't have to choose between open source and enterprise features. GlassFish Enterprise Server offers transparency through the publicly available road map of product requirements and priorities that is strengthened by external contributions and a vibrant community."

The news release continued, "Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 introduces new features to its management and monitoring capabilities, including fine-grained and low overhead monitoring, mod_jk support for service availability, proactive notification of module updates and the ability to manage modules and patches through the GlassFish Update Center."

Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 is based on an OSGi (Open Services Gateway Initiative) run-time, "allowing features to be added dynamically, as necessary. This helps to keep the footprint as small as possible by loading only the modules required to service deployed applications, helping to improve startup time and reduce resource utilization. Based on internal Sun benchmarks, Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 startup times are over twice as fast as v2 and in the case of the Web Profile offering, nearly three times faster," Sun said.