Like Christmas come early, Sun announced the release of JEE 6. This release sees continued improvement in the JEE stack with the inclusion of JSR 299, Java Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI), and EJB 3.1 as well as JSF 2.0, and JPA 2.0. JSF especially has seen changes as a result of practical user feedback and community add-ons such as Seam and JSF Ajax frameworks which have contributed back to the JCP.

Glassfish v3 which implements the full JEE 6 stack has also been released, with JBoss’ Weld as the CDI implementation. Netbeans 6.8 has also been released with full JEE 6 project support including maven support for enterprise applications. Also of note is the hot deploy function of Glassfish which can deploy your app while maintaining session information.

Personally, I’m pleased. JEE 6 has really improved things for the java standards, and CDI has filled some gaps that previously required different additional pieces to completely fill. The ghosts of EJB 2.1 should now be permanently laid to rest, but should serve as a stark reminder. Having good frameworks to build standards based solutions is always good for the community.

I’ll try and get some tutorials on developing with CDI and JSF 2.0 with Netbeans and Glassfish out soon.