Sun Updates Java EE, GlassFish ESB for 2010 
As the new year begins, Sun Microsystems Inc. is shipping Java Platform Enterprise Edition 6 (JEE 6), with the introduction of ‘profiles’ or pre-configured specific application scenarios, including 100% web apps. Moreover, the new tools via a plug-in will work easily with Sun’s GlassFish open source ESB, which has its own improvements on the way, Sun execs said.
Sun’s Java EE 6’s ‘profiles’ offers customers, ISVs and platform vendors more flexibility so they can better address new and existing markets, according to a Sun MySQL official.
“Java EE 6 is designed to be more lightweight and modular to help simplify development, serve more applications and address various deployment scenarios,” ,” said Karen Tegan Padir, vice president of MySQL and Software Infrastructure at Sun, in a statement. The improvements are the result of an extensive, collaborative development effort between Sun, the JCP and open source community members, she added.
Sun’s 3 Main Goals for Java EE 6
- A More Flexible Technology Stack Sun wants Java EE to be leaner and meaner. “Over time, the Java EE platform has gotten big, in some cases too big for certain types of applications,” Sun says on its website. Profiles, which pre-configure Java EE for specific classes of applications, are a way to give Java apps and integration devs just the code they need – and no more.
- Enhanced Extensibility Rather than simply adding new technologies to the Java EE platform (and bloating the code), Sun has added “extensibility points” and “service provider interfaces” to let devs plug in technologies or frameworks into their Java EE 6 implementations in a standard way. Once plugged in, these technologies are just as easy to use as the facilities that are built into the Java EE 6 platform.
- Further Ease of Development Java EE 6 continues to ease development for enterprise, web and integration projects. For example, devs can use annotations to define web components such as servlets and servlet filters. Further, a set of annotations for dependency injection is now standard, making injectable classes much more portable across frameworks.
Full details of the entire Java EE 6 upgrade are available at Sun Developer Network.
As a specific example, Java EE 6 takes special attention to support a broader range of mission-critical web applications.
The lightweight Java EE 6 Web Profile is designed to specifically addresses web application deployments that might not need all the enterprise functions of the broader Java EE platform, the company said. The Web Profile lets developers quickly and easily build applications without having to build and manage a “custom stack,” according to Sun. And developers who need the power of the full platform can easily move from the Web Profile to the complete Java EE 6 platform, the company said.
Later in 2010, Sun will offer a co-bundle between Java EE 6 and GlassFish, and launch a ‘cloud’ strategy and offering for its GlassFish ESB., Kevin Schmidt , director of product management and marketing for Sun's Application Platform organization told IDN. “Stay tuned for news on that [GlassFish in the cloud] coming early in 2010,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Java EE 6 Reference Implementation, TCK and SDK are available now from Sun as a download. The new SDK includes documentation and tools for developers to learn Java EE 6 and accelerate the creation of new enterprise applications. It is available as a download.
