Sun's last SOA hurrah? New releases of Java EE, NetBeans, Glassfish

Sun Microsystems (perhaps soon to be Snorkel if the Oracle acquisition goes through) just released a new raft of platforms and tools targeted at SOA-aware service development and deployment.

The key announcement is a new version of the Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE 6), which is employed in many companies as the nerve center for SOA efforts. The Java EE 6 specification is built under the tutelage of the Java Community Process (JCP).

New features include more support for RESTful Web services, as well as a thing called "Profiles," intended to help target specific Web application scenarios. The lightweight Web Profile, for example, is designed to specifically address Web application deployment scenarios that may not require the full enterprise functionality of the broader Java EE platform. Combined with the newly introduced Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3.1 Lite technology, the Web Profile enables Web developers "to quickly and easily build applications without the need to build and manage a custom stack."

Sun also said it and the GlassFish community are shipping Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3, which is Sun's commercial Java EE app server. There is also an open source counterpart, Glassfish v3. Sun says startup performance is ramped up two to three times over previous versions.

Finally, Sun and the NetBeans developer community announced the availability of the NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE) 6.8, and says its the first IDE to provide support for the Java Platform Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6) and Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3. The NetBeans IDE is a free, open-source IDE, and often is see as a competitor to Eclipse.