Sun has released App Server PE 9, the first robust, commercial grade Java EE 5 compliant application server on the market. There are 2 very interesting things about this release. 1st it is the first app server based on Project GlassFish and that means that the open source community did a fine job of not only developing an app server, but delivering it on time! 2nd Java EE 5 is an important release as it dramatically simplifies the lives of programmers by eliminating much of the boiler plate code they need to write. You can now concentrate on logic and spend much less time on deployment descriptors and such. How much less? Well in Raghu Kodali's blog he demonstrates the amount of code reduction by using the J2EE 1.4 RosterApp tutorial. Raghu shows that (this is specific to EJB 3.0) the number of Java files reduced to 7 from 17 and the number of XML file descriptors decreased to 2 from 9. You can download SJSAS PE 9 here.