Sun Microsystems Releases Open Source GlassFish Server V3 Prelude

Sun Microsystems announced the release of the new GlassFish Enterprise Server V3 Prelude solution, which was developed as a lightweight Web application server based on a modular Open Service Gateway (News - Alert) Initiative (OSGi) architecture.

 

According to Sun Microsystems, GlassFish is one of the most popular open source application servers. The software has surpassed 14 million downloads and 225,000 registrations worldwide since its first release in May 2005, the company claims.

 

Important features of GlassFish include ease of installation and management, modularity and extensibility. The server allows developers to easily scale their projects from small Web-tier deployments to large-scale mission critical architectures and to simplify complex development and production tasks and increase productivity.

Sun Microsystems (News - Alert) also released a new preview of the upcoming Java Platform Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE) application. The new features offer access to the latest functionality in the upcoming Java EE 6 platform, such as EJB 3.1 Lite and Java Server Faces 2.0. It also supports JAX-RS 1.0 for building RESTful Web Services.

 

GlassFish Enterprise Server V3 Prelude offers dynamic language support and allows users to run development languages like Java, Groovy on Grails and JRuby on Rails at the same time without sacrificing performance. It allows JRuby applications to run without the Java technology-based servlet container, eliminating the need to bundle and deploy JRuby applications as Web archive.

 

The new GlassFish server is provided with a simple user interface with point-and-click configuration and also a feature-parity command line interface (CLI) for automated tasks. It simplifies the Web development cycle of Java-based applications to edit code, save and immediately refresh browser with no loss of application state.

 

When combined with the upcoming release of NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE) 6.5, GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 Prelude can offer more productivity, says the company. 

 

According to Karen Tegan Padir, vice president of engineering, Software Infrastructure, Sun Microsystems, GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 Prelude, 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.