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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.
More About GlassFish v3
Sun continued, “The release of GlassFish v3 includes many contributions from Java and open-source community members. Contributions came in the form of leadership from large organizations, bug fixes from individual contributors and developer evangelical activities. For example, Oracle delivered the EclipseLink open-source Java persistence solution and Red Hat delivered the reference implementations for both JSR 303, to standardize a meta-model and API for JavaBean validation, and JSR 299, Contexts and Dependency Injection for the Java EE platform. … The FishCAT (GlassFish Community Acceptance Tests) program was also extremely active, with participants making regular contributions and filing bug reports.” It also said:
““Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 supports a variety of GUI and CLI development tools including the NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE), Eclipse, IntelliJ, Maven, Ant and others. NetBeans 6.8 is the first IDE to offer full support for Java EE 6 … and both the GlassFish Tools Bundle for NetBeans and for Eclipse have been updated to support the productivity enhancements and simplified programming model of the Java EE 6 platform. When combined with the NetBeans IDE or Eclipse, Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 can significantly improve rapid, iterative development. For example, GlassFish v3 retains HTTP session data across application deployments, eliminating the need to repopulate the session data when deploying new code to test.Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 runs a broad range of Java and non-Java technology-based languages, including JRuby/Rails, Jython/DJango, Scala/Lift, PHP, server-side JavaScript and Groovy/Grails. Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 also enables developers to run Jython and JRuby-based applications natively, without requiring a Java Servlet container, offering a natural developer experience with low overhead.”“
Schmidt said with this release the open-source version and the commercial version of GlassFish v3 “are nearly identical–the bits are basically the same.” However, users with the commercial license for GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 will get updates and patches as soon as they become available, as well as fixes to any security issues that may arise, among other things. The Sun statement continued:
““Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 is part of the Sun GlassFish Portfolio, which is available immediately via a flexible subscription-based pricing model starting at $999 per server …. To purchase the Sun GlassFish Portfolio visit: http://www.sun.com/glassfish. [The] Sun GlassFish Portfolio includes: Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server, Sun GlassFish Web Stack Server, Sun GlassFish Web Space Server, Sun GlassFish Enterprise Service Bus, Sun Enterprise Manager, Sun GlassFish Message Queue, Sun Web Server, Sun Web Proxy Server and Sun Continuous Integration Server.”Sun also offers a tiered set of developer support services for its software offerings, ranging from single incident to comprehensive developer plans. In addition, with a broad portfolio of training and certification offerings, developers can enhance their skill sets to take advantage of cutting-edge technologies. To learn more visit http://developers.sun.com/services.”“