Sun releases first J2EE 1.4-compliant app server

Sun Microsystems, still smarting from yet another poor financial quarter — a $760 million loss in fiscal Q3 — Friday announced some good news: the general availability of the first J2EE 1.4-compliant standard application server. The new server follows two key Sun development product releases in the last two weeks: the open source NetBeans 3.6 and the graphical Java Studio Creator IDE.

Officially labeled Java System Application Server Platform Edition 8, the new server is the first update to Sun’s basic Java application server line in two years. Version 8 includes support for the Web Services Integration (WS-I) Basic Profile and the new JavaServer Faces 1.0 APIs. It also includes a free update of the J2EE 1.4 SDK, which Sun said has been downloaded more than 1 million times in last 12 months.

Sun also said the new product uses 55 percent less memory than Version 7. As is standard with Sun servers, developers may download Version 8 free of charge and are allowed to bundle it with applications they create without having to pay licensing fees. The J2EE 1.4 SDK is also free of license fees for development, deployment, and redistribution. Support is available for an additional charge.

Edition 8 is available now for Red Hat Linux, Solaris 8 and 9, and Windows 2000 and XP. Sun said the enterprise edition of the server will be made available later this year.

Sun has also provided migration tools to easily move applications running on the J2EE Reference Implementation 1.3/1.4 Beta1, Sun[tm] ONE Application Server 6.x/7.x, Sun ONE Web Server 6.0, WebLogic Server 5.1/6.0/6.1, WebSphere Application Server 4.0, JBoss 3.0 and Apache Tomcat 4.1. The migration tool can be downloaded from this Sun site.