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CloudBees, provider of a Java platform as a service (PaaS), announced upgraded support for GlassFish v3 while also making Java EE 7 immediately available to developers.
Oracle announced the availability of Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 7 (Java EE 7) and GlassFish 4 on June 12. CloudBees claims to be the first PaaS provider to offer the new Java distribution on its platform. Java EE 7 features higher productivity and HTML5 support in the form of WebSocket and JSON. GlassFish is the reference implementation of Java EE and as such supports Enterprise JavaBeans, Java Persistence API (JPA), JavaServer Faces, Java Message Service (JMS), JavaServer Pages, servlets and more. This enables developers to create enterprise applications that are portable and scalable, and that integrate with legacy technologies.
CloudBees is offering access to Java EE 7 through its support of GlassFish v4, the latest version of Oracle’s open-source application server project that serves as the Reference Implementation (RI) for Java EE 7. The RI provides a complete implementation of the new specification. Developers can now use it as a tool to explore new EE 7 features, to take advantage of them in new applications and to understand how their existing applications are impacted.
Along with GlassFish v4, CloudBees also announced that it is upgrading its support of GlassFish v3 to a supported stack on the CloudBees platform. CloudBees had previously provided support for GlassFish v3 on a community-supported basis only; now developers can use GlassFish v3 for application development and deployment. CloudBees’ support of GlassFish is similar to its support for Tomcat and JBoss, including automatic setup of data sources for database access, scale-out, security realms, session affinity and integration with partner services like New Relic and Papertrail.
“Java EE 7 Web Profile brings new functionalities that allow you to develop modern web applications using, for example, RESTful Web Services, Web Sockets or JSON Processing, along with richer features such as asynchronous session bean invocation or non-persistent EJB Timer Service,” said Antonio Goncalves, a member of the Java EE 7 Expert Group, in a statement. “With the EE 7 Web Profile already available on CloudBees, it is the first time in hosting history that a Java EE reference implementation—GlassFish v4—is available for developers just when the specification is out.”
By providing the Java platform as a hosted service, CloudBees says it has been able to deliver the new Java EE version to developers in the fastest possible time frame. Using CloudBees, Java developers can get up and going with GlassFish, Java EE 7 and Continuous Cloud Delivery simply by clicking on either the GlassFish v3 ClickStart or v4 ClickStart.
“While GlassFish always leads the way on implementation of the Java EE specification, it also has a passionate customer base,” said Steven G. Harris, senior vice president of products at CloudBees, in a statement. “Our GlassFish support on CloudBees puts the power of GlassFish v3 in developers’ hands, along with the newest features of Java EE 7 in GlassFish v4.”
CloudBees announced Continuous Cloud Delivery (CCD) in March as a new approach to accelerate application delivery and meet high-frequency update requirements necessary for Web and mobile applications. CCD represents the fastest way for development teams to push application changes and deploy the resulting code to production, all via the cloud, CloudBees said.
With CCD, enterprises, mobile application developers and software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors are able to deliver incremental software features and updates quickly to keep up with rapidly changing markets. Rather than following traditional, lengthy software release cycles, software teams must deliver software in a more agile manner. CCD addresses this need by automating the development and testing processes, ensuring that software applications are always in a ready-to-deploy state.
“Our customers have made it very clear to us, time-to-market is their most pressing business challenge,” said Sacha Labourey, CEO and founder of CloudBees. “Leveraging the CloudBees Platform, Continuous Cloud Delivery provides the quickest way to deliver applications and ensure the highest levels of quality.”