Glassfish

The Glassfish community is building a free, open source application server which implements the newest features in the Java EE 5 platform (the next version of the J2EE platform) as well as tools to administer the server. While the Java EE 5 specification is not yet finalized, the Glassfish community provides milestone builds which implement current version of the specification. The latest milestone build (5) is availabe for download at the Glassfish site. This build implements the public final draft of version of all the Java EE 5 specifications except EJB 3.0. Here is a link to the JEE 5 API docs. The public review draft of the Java EE 5 specification is available on the JCP site as JSR244. Here are a few features new to Java EE 5 over J2EE 1.4:

• Most boilerplate requirements have been eliminated, and XML descriptors are now optional. For example, the ejb-jar.xml descriptor is no longer necessary in most cases.
• More defaults are available, with a special emphasis on making them meaningful. Developers now have fewer details to remember.
• Web service support is simpler, and the number of supported standards has increased.
• The EJB software programming model is significantly simpler.
• The new Java Persistence API is available to all Java platform applications, including those based on EJB technology.
• JavaServer Faces technology has been added to make web application design more convenient.