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Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVA) on Monday announced the immediate availability of the GlassFish V2 Beta. Sun also unveiled its new Web Developer Pack as well as the creation of a Java Specification Request 311.
GlassFish V2 Beta adds the enterprise features found on Sun's Java System Application Server Enterprise Edition in order to support highly scalable, volume enterprise developments for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 applications, according to Sun.
Java and Windows Interoperability
GlassFish V2 features include WSIT (Web services interoperability technologies) integration, allowing application interoperability between Web services hosted on Java and Windows environments; Java Business Integration for native SOA support; and NetBeans IDE integration, which enables developers to deploy SOA applications by designing BPEL (business process execution language) business processes as well as building and testing composite applications with NetBeans.
"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 of enterprise Java platforms at Sun Microsystems. "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 original GlassFish V1, launched about two years ago, was geared toward developers, Ken Drachnik, community development and marketing 
manager for Sun's Open Source Group, told LinuxInsider.
"That ended up being the reference implementation for Java EE 5," he said.
"The features in Java EE 5 enable enterprises to deploy large, scalable enterprise applications," he continued. "These are typically very high volume SOA or Web 2.0 applications that end up getting tremendous traffic from the public."
Customized for the Market
Drachnik pointed to the online DVD trader PeerFlix, which uses virtual cash to facilitate the trading of used DVDs among users.
Sun's new offerings speed up companies' abilities to offer further versions of Java with features specifically designed for their markets, he added.
"It makes the point for open source speeding innovation in the market," Drachnik said.
All the REST
Sun on Monday also announced the its latest Web Developer Pack, a toolkit the company says is designed for simplifying and enabled advanced rich Internet applications for the Java platform, as well as creating REST (Representational State Transfer) Web services and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds more rapidly.
The Web Developer Pack will be bundled into the Sun Java Application Platform SDK Suite update 3 preview, which includes the GlassFish V2 Beta.
Sun says its new Java Specification Request (JSR) 311 focuses on providing support for RESTful Web Services in the Java Platform working with other vendors, including Apache, Google, BEA, JBoss, TmaxSoft and Jerome Louvel. The new JSR will work to promote standardization around next-generation Web technologies, according to the company.
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