Communiqué de presse Sun Microsystems

10/12/2009 - Sun Microsystems Launches GlassFish Enterprise Server v3

First Java EE 6 Compatible Application Server Eliminates Complexity and Gains Significant New Features and Increased Flexibility

SANTA CLARA, Calif. December 10, 2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) and the GlassFish community, today 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. GlassFish is the industry's most downloaded Java EE compatible application server, with over 24 million downloads to date. Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 provides provides customers with an enterprise grade, open source based application server solution focused on reducing application and deployment complexity. Download and begin development with Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 today at: http://www.sun.com/glassfishv3.

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.

"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."

Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 is based on a flexible OSGi runtime, allowing features to be added dynamically, as necessary. This helps to keeps 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 conference and provided countless software fixes. The FishCAT (GlassFish Community Acceptance Tests) program was also extremely active, with participants making made 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.

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 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.

Pricing and Availability

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 (USD), making it the most cost-effective solution in the market. To purchase the Sun GlassFish Portfolio visit: http://www.sun.com/glassfish. 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 skillsets to take advantage of cutting-edge technologies. To learn more visit http://developers.sun.com/services. A full curriculum of Java EE 6 courses and certifications will be available soon. See http://java.sun.com/javaee/support/training/ for details and to register to receive notifications on course availability.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision -- "The Network is the Computer" -- Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Java, GlassFish, NetBeans and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.

Supporting Quotes from GlassFish Customers and Partners

ICEsoft Technologies

"With GlassFish V3, the development and deployment of Ajax Push-enabled Rich Internet Applications is now made easier than ever before. GlassFish V3's compatibility with the JSF 2.0 standard and its inclusion of JMS, when combined with ICEfaces 2.0, make the ICEfaces Ajax Push Server an ideal platform from which to launch these design initiatives. For the first time, GlassFish users will be able to confidently deploy Ajax Push-enabled applications into highly scalable failover environments," said Brian McKinney, CEO, ICEsoft Technologies.

Jaspersoft
"GlassFish v3 raises the bar on performance and flexibility. Jaspersoft customers continue to demand environments of greater scalability, and the surge in use of Jaspersoft products with GlassFish certainly demonstrates that it delivers," said Jose Morales, vice president of Business Development, Jaspersoft.

KonaKart
"KonaKart, our Java software-based eCommerce platform, can easily be deployed on the new GlassFish v3 platform to take full advantage of the flexibility and rich features introduced in GlassFish v3 with its full Java EE 6 environment. KonaKart can be deployed easily by dropping its WARs into the auto-deploy directories or using the other standard deployment options provided in GlassFish. GlassFish has proven to be a stable and reliable environment for running KonaKart, and this is set to improve still further with v3," said John Hornsby, business development, KonaKart.

Liferay
"Liferay will benefit greatly from Java EE 6, particularly from the support for Profiles and Extensibility. Given our strategy to support multiple Java EE web containers, the Java EE standard remains critical to our ability to manage development costs. The new Web Profile will allow flexible new deployments that scale from lighter to full stack Java EE profiles, while the new extensibility features will allow us to support a broad set of open source technologies," said Bryan Cheung, CEO, Liferay, Inc.

Lodgon
"With DaliReporter, the community of end users is responsible for gathering, enriching and distributing data. The GlassFish v3 platform is a perfectly modular and scalable system that provides the solid foundation for the back end," said Johan Vos, CTO, Lodgon.

New Relic

"New Relic RPM is a software-as-a-service performance management tool that enables IT and development teams to monitor, troubleshoot and tune web applications. For organizations building and deploying applications on GlassFish v3, it offers powerful capabilities that help ensure Java application health and availability," said Bill Lapcevic, vice president of Business Development, New Relic, Inc.

NGASI
NGASI AppServer Manager automates multiple installations and configurations for GlassFish v3 on a single server machine, across multiple VPS (Virtual Servers), and across multiple servers. As a technology provider to web hosting services, we are seeing more requests for GlassFish from our customers. These requests are a result of their clients migrating to GlassFish from other application servers," said Gabe Wong, founder, NGASI.

Noemax Technologies

"GlassFish v3 is moving into new territory! With the network layer built on top of Grizzly 1.9.18, GlassFish v3 users can now finely configure custom network transports and protocols using a domain configuration file. At Noemax, as a Sun partner that works on the WCF side of things, we are preparing to take advantage of Grizzly's new features. Our WCF-Xtensions already offer to .NET developers interoperability with the advanced features of GlassFish, such as the Fast Infoset message encoding and the SOAP/TCP transport. Soon we will be contributing custom compression algorithms to Grizzly, which will be leveraged by GlassFish v3 and will further increase the choices they currently have for improving network performance. For us, GlassFish is the Java application server that leads in innovation and performance," said Alexander Philippou, managing director, Noemax Technologies.

ObjectSecurity
"GlassFish v3's solid JACC implementaiton allowed the quick integration of GlassFish with OpenPMF, our fine-grained model-driven application security policy automation product, to satisfy the security needs of our customers in mission-critical industries," said Ulrich Lang, PhD, CEO, ObjectSecurity LLC.

Ontomantics
"Ontomantics is an enterprise software framework that allows organizations to seamlessly automate their business processes, all completely within a centralized, secure on-line environment, without the inconvenience of in-depth programming or code generation complexity. Thanks to our GlassFish integration and Sun partnership, Ontomantics is keeping track of the most up to date technology with better value, while customers are getting a faster return on investment from their IT assets," said Philippe Baumann, CEO, Ontomantics S.A.S.

ProContent LLC

"How do you design and scale a virtual environment to enable millions of children to become financially capable adults? You start with a product that is inexpensive and simple, that can grow from one box to thousands. GlassFish v3's OSGI architecture is the standard for our next generation of products and supports the high projected growth of our business. After working with competitors over the last ten years, including Sybase EAServer, BEA WebLogic, Orion/Oracle and JBoss/RedHat, we chose GlassFish, mainly because of its Java EE standard adherence, and the ease of accommodating Java EE frameworks such as SpringSource, Hibernate, and others, helping us to avoid lock-in issues and making upgrades simpler, reducing TCO. The administration interface is as comprehensible to systems administrators as it is to the developers, allowing them to collaborate and troubleshoot more effectively. Applications make it into production more quickly, speeding time to ROI," said Curtis Fisher, CEO, ProContent LLC.

Vaadin

"For rich, server-driven Java web frameworks like Vaadin, it is essential to have a fast and reliable application server to deploy and run. Developers are always looking for a shorter code-deploy-run cycle, and GlassFish v3 really seems to take things to next level. Also, using GlassFish v3's OSGi capabilities, developers can build and deploy highly modular Vaadin applications and keep the coding cycle short even for very large applications. Parts of web UI can be loaded dynamically and new features added on demand - even without restarting the application. This makes a completely new kind of web application possible," said Sami Ekblad, project manager, Vaadin .

Zinnia Systems

"Zarada, our integrated suite of customer management, revenue management, service fulfillment and business analytic products for Communication Service Providers (CSPs), is already made available on GlassFish V3, in line with our commitment to provide our customers a robust, efficient, massively scalable and easy-to-use application container. Zarada's high flexibility and scalability, combined with GlassFish v3's comprehensive administrative features and Java EE 6 support, enables CSPs to create a superior customer experience, streamline operational processes, and support subscriber and usage growth in a simple and cost-effective way," said Chiranjib Bhandary, CEO, Zinnia Systems.