Specifically, Glassfish V2 adds back the clustering support and centralized administration that you had in the J2EE-based Sun Java Application Server 8.x. Other bells and whistles in Glassfish V2 include Project Metro, which is Sun’s Microsoft web services compatibility kit. That is, you could expose a service from something like an Excel spreadsheet, and with Project metro, you’ll be assured that it will connect to a high availability Sun Java appserver back end.
Sun is also trumpeting its benchmarks for Glassfish V2, claiming 10% better SpecJ performance over BEA WebLogic Server 9.x. Sun also claims default victories over IBM and JBoss, which haven’t taken SpecJ benchmarks of their own products. And it claims much greater scalability over JBoss.
Of course, Sun will offer the commercial version of Glassfish V2 as Sun Java Application Server 9, and will drop subscription prices to be at parity with JBoss. As enterprises look to open source to adopt Java EEE 5, we want to take price off the table, said GlassFish marketing manager John Clingan.
This week, Sun is also rolling out the next version of the NetBeans open source IDE. Then new version includes a rewritten code editor that Sun claims improves developer productivity. Version 6 adds support of JSR 199, also known as Java C, which supports command line compilers for Java.
The result is that you can now handle code fragments (as opposed to full programs) far more efficiently. That means, if you update a Java program, you can just compile the changes rather than having to go back and recompile the entire piece of code.
Additionally NetBeans 6 adds various enhancements, such as the ability to view two versions of a file to look for changes, improved caching so you can recover lost files more readily, and the ability to set up multiple run times for a project.
Other enhancements include adding more granularity to NetBeans’ Java profiling tools and a new graphical tool to browse memory heaps for tracking memory leaks. Finally, NetBeans 6 adds support for JSR 295 and 296, which include beans binding, which respectively connect Swing controls to back end databases, and provide aid for using Java annotations.
Both new releases are available now.
