As I pre-announced a week ago, today we are releasing the Java EE 6 platform and GlassFish v3. All the links to the download pages, plus white papers, overviews, docs, press releases and plenty of blogs to bring you up to speed are on The Aquarium. I'll just call out here the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 site and also the NetBeans 6.8 download page. For a quick glance at the API, you can look at the javadocs.

Rather than go over each component one by one, I'd like to take this opportunity to explain why I have such great expectations for the adoption of Java EE 6. This release not only delivers a lot of immediately useful technology, in the form of new APIs (JAX-RS, CDI, Bean Validation) as well as improved ones (EJB, JPA, Servlet, JSF, Connectors, ...), it also lays the foundation for the future by introducing profiles, defining the pruning process, adding important extensibility APIs (notably in Servlets and CDI), introducing managed beans, refactoring interceptors in their separate spec, etc. It's good to see so much forward thinking on the part of the various expert groups, and I'm clearly pleased with the kind of coordination that went on.

In this respect, I trust you'll find the technologies in Java EE 6 to be integrated with each other to a much larger extent than in any prior release. Obviously, since we're operating under strict backward compatibility requirements, some of the uglier aspects are still there, but I think we managed to hide them from view quite effectively, so that in developing new applications for Java EE 6 you'll be mostly dealing with "new style" APIs and packaging.

In thanking once again everyone who was involved in this effort, I'd like to invite you to download GlassFish v3 and start using Java EE 6 today!