Yesterday, we released new versions of two of the products in our GlassFish Portfolio, delivering on what we announced a few weeks ago at Oracle Open World.

The first is GlassFish Enterprise Server 2.1.1.  This is a minor release but includes some important bug fixes and updates to several component packages including JSF, Grizzly, Jersey, and  OpenMQ.  More details are on the community wiki.

Building upon GlassFish Enterprise Server 2.1.1 is GlassFish Communications Server v2.  Built in open-source in the Sailfin community, this product provides a robust Java EE and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) convergence platform and in this release adds SIP session replication, Diameter support, and more.  Eduardo has a nice summary in The Aquarium.

You may download GlassFish Enterprise Server 2.1.1 or GlassFish Communications Server v2 so give them a try.  If you want more info or are interested in getting commercial support, added features, and more, contact us or try our online chat with someone that can help you.

As I mentioned last week, we were able to get a number of talks on Java EE 6 at Oracle Open World and the Oracle Develop conference going on as I write this in San Francisco.  In looking for folks thoughts and reactions to what they saw, I came across a blog entry by Cay Horstmann that I thought hit on a bunch of the key points we were hoping to share there so deserved a mention.

A few quotes from his blog:

"I cannot overemphasize how much simpler EE6 is than just about any web programming model I know. All of the bad parts of the old EJB are gone. No XML. No crazy packaging of WARs and JARs inside EARs. Annotate your beans and persistent objects, and let the container worry about the database, transactions, clustering, and so on."

"Similarly, if you haven't given GlassFish v3 a try, you are in for a very pleasant surprise. It is fast. Startup is not just faster than JBoss, but faster than Tomcat! Hot deployment works great, there is a nice admin UI and a scriptable command line interface, and the Eclipse and Netbeans integrations are first-rate. I can't see myself going back to Tomcat—there just would be no point."

If you want to learn more, visit glassfish.org and download GlassFish v3 Preview which will give you early access to these new capabilities Cay mentions.

Oracle Open World comes around every fall and while Sun has been a sponsor in the past, for the first time, at least in my recent memory, we will have sessions for Sun software, specifically around Java, and more specifically for my interests around Java EE.  And not only are we at Open World but we are at the smaller Oracle Develop event being run at the same time.

At Open World, the Java EE specific sessions are:

• S312765 - Java Platform, Enterprise Edition: The Foundation and Future of Your Enterprise - Tom Kincaid - Monday 4pm-5pm Marriott Salon 4
• S312767 - Easy Database Access from Java with Java Persistence API 2.0 - Linda DeMichiel - Wednesday 10:15am-11:15am Marriott Nob Hill AB