Sun Offers Commercial Version Of GlassFish

Santa Clara, California-based Sun Microsystems, Inc has today (November 7) launched a  commercial version of its GlassFish open-source application server. Christened “Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server version 3 Prelude”, the product is targeted at Web-tier production environments, and is an intermediate edition of the full-fledged GlassFish Enterprise Server v3, which will be a “complete application server based on the OSGi standard and the upcoming Java EE 6 platform.”

GlassFish is Sun’s offering in the open source application server domain. Developers using GlassFish can deploy their applications to the v3 Prelude very easily. While working on IDEs such as NetBeans 6.5 and Eclipse, the deployment is said to be as simple as edit-save-refresh. Already-installed packages can be quickly updated, and additional new packages such as JRuby, Groovy and the Metro Web Services Stack can be downloaded from the GlassFish Update Center maintained by Sun. These new packages can be used to develop and deploy applications directly on the microkernel, bypassing totally the servlet container. In addition, the Update Center affords early access to Java EE 6 technologies such as Java Server Faces 2.0, Enterprise Java Beans 3.1 Lite, and JAX-RS 1.0.

Yet another nifty feature of the GlassFish Server is its embeddability in one’s own application.

Sun is now offering the GlassFish Enterprise Server subscriptions through three support levels: Standard (starting from USD 4,500 per annum), Premium (starting from USD 6,750 per annum) and Premium Plus (starting from USD 7,875 per annum).

Read more about the product and its pricing.