GlassFish v3 Is Now Available

Today, the GlassFish team is pleased to announce the release of GlassFish v3. This release marks the first production-ready release of a Java EE 6 compliant application server. It also marks the culmination of a tremendous engineering effort to transform the very capable but monolithic GlassFish v2 into a small, sleek and scalable modular system, built on OSGi. You can get all the details over at The Aquarium.

Of all the features in this release, the two I’m the proudest of are the console, on which I work during the day, and JSF 2, on which I work when I can. The console, while it looks similar to that in v2 (somewhat by design), has undergone a pretty serious makeover. We’ve removed the frameset, which solved a number of issues on both the client and the server, we introduced the use of the YUI LayoutManager to help with the page layout, and we implemented Ajax-based navigation (which was one of my major tasks, along with Ken Paulsen). The result is, I think, a lighter, faster console. It posed some interesting challenges, but I think we were able to work everything out to make a very nice and snappy console. We’re not resting on our laurels, though. Like the rest of the server, our team has some grand plans for upcoming releases in the console.

On the backend, we had to do a fair amount of rework to accomadate all the changes made to support the modularity introduced for v3. For example, as we demonstrated at a Hands-on-Lab at JavaOne, the console is pluggable, which allows developers, OEMs, admins, etc to create and install plugins that add functionality to the console. In fact, that’s how we delivered all of the non-core functionality in the console. If you’re running the web profile, you won’t see anything JMS-related, for instance.

The other feature I’m pretty proud of is JSF 2. As an Expert Group member and sadly not-too-active-committer (at the moment) on Mojarra, the JSF implementation we ship with GlassFish, I’m really, really pleased with how JSF 2 turned out. In what spare time I can find, I’ve been doing some application development as well as component development using the new spec, and it’s been a joy to work with. From annotations to composite components and more, JSF 2 is just really easy to work with (I hope to blog more on that in the near future).

In addition to those, v3 offers CDI (via Weld), JPA 2, EJB 3.1, Servlet 3.0, and on and on. There should be something for everyone, so do yourself a favor and check it out. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.