News
Sun Makes Splash With GlassFish 2.0 Release
- By Will Kraft
- September 28, 2007
Sun Microsystems, in conjunction with the
GlassFish Community, announced the availability of GlassFish 2.0, a major server upgrade that works with the Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and Windows operating systems. GlassFish is an application server that streams Java applications to client computers, much like the Apache Web server software does with HTML.
Version 2 strengthens the open source and enterprise combination. It adds features that were once only found in the enterprise version, including:
- Clustering, enabling enterprises to group servers for scalability;
- Centralized administration, supporting multiple servers from a central console; and
- Project Metro, which ensures compatibility between Java applications and Windows environments.
Sun also highlighted GlassFish 2.0's features for service-oriented architecture (SOA)-type deployments. Those features include an "Open ESB" (enterprise service bus), "Java Business Integration" (a standardized way to deliver SOA using Web services) and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) integration in NetBeans.
NetBeans is an integrated development environment (IDE), a free open source development tool for writing Java software. The NetBeans version 6.0 beta was released around the same time as GlassFish 2.0 and features better integration with it. NetBeans 6 adds greater control to the interface, allowing users to select only the dev tools they need.
NetBeans 6.0 also has enhanced support for Web-oriented languages such as Ruby and JavaScript. Ruby is particularly suited for NetBeans due to the JRuby extension that allows the use of Ruby on Rails framework in conjunction with Java code. The NetBeans release also has better inspection and navigation capabilities, local history, integrated support for Subversion (a version control system used by many open source applications), and extensive profiling features.