What is the Application Server?

The Sun Java System Application Server is a fully-featured, Java EE platform application server providing the foundation for building reliable, scalable, and manageable applications. With its comprehensive set of features and support for component-based development, the Sun Java System Application Server provides the underlying core functionality necessary for the development and deployment of business-driven applications.

• Improved Administration — Application Server provides remote secure management using a browser-based Admin Console and a scriptable command-line interface. The new Admin Console features include:

• Comprehensive web services management and development support

• Enhanced monitoring, visualization and diagnostic tools

• Enhancements to the Java Management Extensions (JMX™) MBean API to provide for remote, secure, programmatic administration and monitoring using JMX

• Improved Performance — Application deployment is faster, which makes iterative application development quicker and easier. The runtime performance of EJB components is also improved.

• Expanded Platform Support — The Application Server supports additional operating systems, databases, locales, and hardware (see the Release Notes for the latest list of supported platforms).

• Migration and Upgrade Tools — These tools enable you to verify Java EE applications for standards conformance and portability, help with migrations from other Java EE application servers, and aid in upgrading from previous versions of the Application Server.

• Java 2 Standard Edition Support — The Application Server supports Java 2 Standard Edition, which includes enhanced management and monitoring features and many performance and scalability improvements.

• JDBC Drivers — The Application Server includes DataDirect^TM JDBC^TM drivers for major databases. You can use these drivers for deployment.

• Web Services Security — Container message security mechanisms implement message-level authentication (for example, XML digital signature and encryption) of SOAP web services invocations using the X.509 and username/password profiles of the OASIS WS-Security standard.

• WS-I Profile 1.1 — As mandated by the Java EE specification, Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) Basic Profile 1.1 enables interoperability for web services applications.

• Backend Connectivity with iWay Adapters — Sun Microsystems supports twenty-two iWay adapters to key backend systems to help customers leverage existing applications from the Application Server environment. These adapters support the Java EE Connector Architecture 1.5 specification and web services standards (SOAP), and include developer tools to reduce time to connect to backend applications.

Key Features

The Sun Java System Application Server includes the following key features:

• Java EE Platform Support — This release implements all of the specifications covered by the Java EE platform. For a complete list of the Java EE technologies included, see Java EE 5 Platform APIs in Sun Java System Application Server Platform Edition 9 Release Notes.

• JavaServer Faces 1.2 — Application Server supports JavaServer Faces, which simplifies building user interfaces for Java Server applications. Developers can quickly build web applications by assembling reusable user-interface components in a page, connecting the components to an application data source, and wiring client-generated events to server-side event handlers.

• JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library 1.2 — The Application Server supports the JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL) 1.2, which encapsulates core functionality common to many JSP applications.

• Administrative Tools — The Application Server includes a command-line tool and a browser-based Administration Console graphical user interface.

• High Performance Message Delivery — This product supports concurrent message delivery with the Sun Java System Message Queue software.

• Developer Tool Integration — The Application Server supports the NetBeans Integrated Development Environment and Sun Java Studio Creator.