Deep Dive: Java EE 6 and the GlassFish v3 With Arun Gupta

Recently, Sun announced the general availability of Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 6 and GlassFish v3. Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) is the industry-standard platform for building enterprise-class applications coded in the Java programming language. Based on the solid foundation of Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE), Java EE adds libraries and system services that support the scalability, accessibility, security, integrity, and other requirements of enterprise-class applications.

The previous release of the Java EE platform, Java EE 5, made it significantly easier to develop web and enterprise applications. However, Java EE 6 pushes the usability envelope even further, adding ease of use improvements in many areas of the platform. Beyond those improvements, Java EE 6 adds many new features that make the platform more flexible and extensible.

GlassFish v3 is a lightweight, flexible, and open-source application server that is the reference implementation for Java EE 6. But it's much more than that. It also offers a wide range of new productivity features, such as a modular runtime based on OSGi that makes for extremely fast startup, efficient memory use, and enhanced runtime performance.

In this Deep Dive, Sun Technology Evangelist, Arun Gupta, highlighted some of the new and cool features provided by Java EE 6 technologies. These include enhanced authoring capabilities offered by JavaServer Faces (JSF) 2.0, annotation-based configuration enabled by Servlet 3.0 that makes it a lot easier to configure web frameworks for use with Java EE, and simplified packaging in EJB 3.1.

Arun also demonstrated some of the new and cool productivity features in GlassFish v3 such as the fast startup enabled by GlassFish v3's modular runtime. He followed this with an example that demonstrated how easy it is to develop and deploy a scripting application in GlassFish v3 -- in this case, a JRuby on Rails application. Yes, GlassFish v3 supports scripting applications as well as Java applications. Arun ended with a clever proof-of-concept demonstration of a new REST-based interface that can be used to build tools that perform GlassFish-related administration and monitoring tasks.

Watch this Deep Dive and learn more about what's new and cool in Java EE 6 and GlassFish v3.

• Part 1: What's new and cool in Java EE 6.
• Part 2: What's New and Cool in GlassFish v3.