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Sun Microsystems and the GlassFish community announced the immediate availability of Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3, the latest release of Sun's commercial Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application server and its open source counterpart, GlassFish v3.

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Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 provides customers with an enterprise grade, open source based application server solution focused on reducing application and deployment complexity.

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Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 is the industry’s first application server to support the new Java Platform Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6).

Java EE 6 introduces features to increase the flexibility of the platform and enable companies to use the new, lightweight Web Profile, in addition to the full enterprise platform, to help meet their business requirements. (See related press release – Sun Microsystems Releases Java Platform Enterprise Edition 6) 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, which enable more rapid development and help to decrease development costs and time-to-market.

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“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. People should think of GlassFish v3 as a pluggable runtime that can host many types of containers and enable rapid, iterative development with multiple programming languages – allowing customers to consolidate to a single platform/runtime,” said Karen Tegan Padir, vice president of MySQL and Software Infrastructure at Sun. “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 roadmap of product requirements and priorities that is strengthened by external contributions and a vibrant community.”

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Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 is based on a flexible OSGi runtime, 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. Developers can start with the Web Profile then, using the integrated GlassFish Update Center, seamlessly move to the complete Java EE 6 platform as they scale their applications – without sacrificing throughput performance.

Community Contribution
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. Individual community members helped identify show stopper issues, engaged with module leads, evangelized GlassFish in many public events and conferences and provided countless software fixes. The FishCAT (GlassFish Community Acceptance Tests) program was also extremely active, with participants making regular contributions and filing bug reports.

New Monitoring and Management Features
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.

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Flexible, Extensible, Customizable
The flexibility and extensibility of Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 enables third parties to leverage an embedded API to create a customized, integrated solution within a single Java Virtual Machine. Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 administration is extensible and enables extensions to be exposed through the web console, Command Line Interface (CLI) and RESTful API administration facilities. In addition, Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 provides the ability for OEMs to re-brand the administration interface, install custom OSGi bundles and leverage the RESTful administration API for secure, remote programmatic administration and monitoring.

Developer Tool and Language Support
Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 supports a variety of GUI and CLI development tools including the NetBeans(TM) 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 (See related press release – Sun Microsystems Releases NetBeans IDE 6.8) 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.

Click here to to leverage the AMP/SAMP stack with your existing GlassFish Enterprise Server deployments in your organization.