Java EE 6 builds on the Ease of Development theme of its predecessor and Roberto's latest post sketches the new additions, which includes the improvements in Servlet 3.0 (tune in to Rajiv's presentation on Dec 4th), JAX-RS, JSF 2.0, EJB 3.0, WebBeans, Bean Validation and more. Roberto's webinar is on Dec 18th.

Jim has a series of posts showing the benefits of JSF 2.0; the latest entry shows how to write a Spinner Component, and then how to Adding Styles to it and, then, making the implementation Fully Reusable. Check it out!

Juien created a new IzPack installer for GlassFish v3; check out the GFv3 Installer, a description of the New Features developed for it, and the corresponding IzPack 4.1.1 announcement.

I'm a fan of Tufte, so it is very pleasant to see a reference to his work in Paul Murphy's Review at ZDNet of our recent OpenStorage release. Paul refers to the systems ability for real time monitoring and action (like in this screenshot); hopefully we will see more exploration of these principles in the industry. Thanks to Brian for the tip.

The biggest news for Sun this week was Friday's Restructuring announcement (PR, Tim O'Brien, The Register). It is still early so just some observations based on publicly available information: GlassFish is mentioned prominently (and positively) in all the news pieces; it will be good to be closer to the MySQL folks; we will all miss Rich Green; by all metrics GlassFish adoption continues to grow (see, for example, Admin Ping Map).

Mike's summarizes the architectural approach behind the new systems this way:

There are three things that will be at the core of everything we do: a true software architecture for Flash, the Hybrid Storage Pool; users empowered with real-time Analytics so you can finally understand what your box is doing and how to make it better; and an open, industry-standard architecture: open on-disk formats, open protocols, and a compute and i/o architecture with volume economics behind it that doubles in speed and capacity every 12-18 months.

From Rajeev, a report on an OpenSSO WebStart Prototype done through embedding GlassFish v3. Just click and go! A big change from a couple of years ago when installing and starting Sun's Access Manager was such a big task! And, from SuperPat a report on OpenSSO Integration with JIRA, done by Alexey.

From Arun, trip reports on the RailsConf Europe 2008 at Berlin, Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3.

The VirtualBox team has been very busy and they have Released VirtualBox 2.0 (Press Release). Check the Changelog and Download it. A change in this release is that, as with the strategy followed by the rest of our Open Source portfolio, VB 2.0 now has enterprise support.

On the Storage side, a Press Release reporting that Sun's market share growth the last quarter grew almost 30% Y-to-Y (top in the industry). And this is w/o the OpenStorage systems getting readied, see ComputerWorld and NYTimes.

And a very warm welcome back to Lew Tucker. Lew was in the original JavaSoft group and we overlapped briefly there. Sun has quite an open door policy to people who left (and bring back fresh experiences from outside). We even have coined a term for them: Boomerangs :-).

The successor to Thumper is SunFire x4500, faster and bigger than before but still the same storage/server hybrid.

The new storage family combines a Bunch of Disks (BoD) - SATA/SAS - and OpenSolaris/ZFS (and later Flash Memory), to deliver up to 72Gb/sec throughput and up to 192 SATA disks on 16RU at around 1$ per GB.