As I blogged before, Milestone 3 of Glassfish, our opensource J2EE application server is out.
I downloaded and deployed a quite complex application, our Identity Manager and Identity Auditor.
Here are my observations:

1. startup is really fast. Glassfish code already contains the feature called On demand service startup (or lazy initialization)
Briefly it means that application server is able start with  minimum services and start any other services that is required for a user application or by a user action.
Consequences:

• actual startup time is around 50% less then in Application Server 8. (AS8)
• memory footprint is also around 50% of AS8.

Binod from engineering will have a blog about lazy init soon.
It is actually here

2. I deployed the applications above. The next surprise is that deployment time was 10 sec vs 30 sec  compared to deploying the same war to AS8.
Pretty cool. And Glassfish did not even reach the beta status.

[Glassfish]