AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 East, New York City -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. and the GlassFish(TM) community, today announced the beta release of the GlassFish V2, the next major version of the open source Java(TM) EE 5 application server and the release of the Sun(TM) Web Developer Pack, a toolkit designed for simplifying and enabling advanced rich Internet applications for the Java platform. These releases help enterprises build and deploy SOA and Web 2.0 applications and services leveraging next generation web technologies such as Ajax, Scripting and REST that simplifies development and deployment of scalable, interactive applications.

The GlassFish V2 Beta adds all the enterprise features from Sun's Java System Application Server Enterprise Edition, such as clustering, administration, Web Services Interoperability Technology (WSIT) and load balancing to support highly scalable, volume enterprise deployments for SOA and Web 2.0 applications. A few of these features include:

-- WSIT integration -- allowing applications to interoperate between Web services hosted on Java and Windows environments. -- Java Business Integration (JBI) -- providing native SOA support. -- NetBeans(TM) IDE integration -- enabling developers to deploy SOA applications by designing BPEL business processes as well as building and testing composite applications with the NetBeans(TM) Enterprise Pack.

The GlassFish V2 Beta (http://java.sun.com/javaee/downloads/ea/) is available now via download.

"The flexibility of open source technologies, along with the unmatched security, stability, ease-of management and scalability of Solaris 10 and the GlassFish application server will enable us to grow our business and our community to meet the growing demand," said Cyril Bouteille, chief technology officer, Peerflix, Inc.

"The release of GlassFish V2 Beta further demonstrates Sun's commitment and leading contributions to the open source community," said Karen Tegan Padir, vice president, Enterprise Java Platforms, Sun. "GlassFish continues to proffer widely adopted open source based solutions that provide developers with industry leading enterprise scalability and ease of deployment on Web 2.0 and SOA applications."

The Sun Web Developer Pack (http://developers.sun.com/web/swdp) simplifies access to multiple open source technologies for creating rich Internet-based applications, REST Web services and RSS feeds more rapidly. The availability of the Web 2.0 toolkit reinforces Sun's commitment to provide the developer community with next-generation Java technologies such as Project jMaki, Project Phobos, Dynamic Faces, WADL, ROME, and Atom.

A prominent Java community member, Ben Galbraith, co-founder of Ajaxian.com, has worked extensively with one of the technologies which is now being supported and made available through the Sun Web Developer Pack. "jMaki offers a compelling model for creating rich component-oriented Ajax interfaces in Java," said Galbraith. "It standardizes Ajax component interfaces, smoothly integrates multiple Ajax frameworks such as Dojo and YUI!, provides a powerful declarative event handling mechanism, and makes it easy to do mash-ups with its built-in and easily configurable proxy server. Before you start down the path of integrating some of the popular Ajax frameworks into your application, learn jMaki first."

The pack will be bundled into the Sun Java Application Platform SDK Suite update 3 preview which includes the GlassFish V2 Beta, available for download today. Available with a NetBeans plug-in, the Web Developer Pack enables developers to easily and rapidly deploy Web 2.0 applications and lightweight, dynamic code development. Check out the Sun Web Developer Pack at http://developers.sun.com/web/swdp.

Sun is also announcing the creation of a Java Specification Request (JSR) 311 focused on providing support for RESTful Web Services in the Java Platform working with other vendors such as BEA, Apache, Google, Jboss, TmaxSoft and Jerome Louvel (author of the Restlet project). This JSR will help further promote standardization around the next generation web technologies and will aim to provide easy-to-use API for developers for Java EE or Java SE platforms.