Java EE 6 developers will wake up this morning and be able to experience a new, major release of the Oracle GlassFish Server and the companion GlassFish Server 3.1, Open Source Edition.  This release extends Java EE 6 Reference Implementation New Application Development Capabilities, Centralized Administration and High Availability Features.  IDE tool support will include NetBeans and Eclipse  (update center link is here), as well as the next release of Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse will be updated to include the new GlassFish 3.1 Server Plug-in.

Developers will be interested in the vastly improved OSGi support in GlassFish 3.1, as well as other developer friendly-features:

- Enables hybrid application development

• Easily utilize OSGi services from Java EE Applications
• Easily utilize Java EE services from OSGi services

- Updates the Apache Felix runtime to 3.0.6, including the Apache Gogo shell

- OSGi Web Console integrated with GlassFish Admin Console (requires Update Center download, community supported)

- Extends GlassFish Server 3.0 ActiveRedeploy feature to include Stateful EJBs. When applications are re-deployed, GlassFish maintains HTTP session and EJB state, enabling rapid iterative development

- Application-scoped resources enable developers to limit the scope of resources to a deployed application

- JDBC statement leak detection and reclaim automatically monitors, logs, and reclaims database cursors when applications fail to do so

- Full EJB feature support in Embedded API