Sun warms up Java offering

Sun Microsystems has unveiled its Java System Application Server Platform Edition 8, which it says is the first commercially available offering of the Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition 1.4 specification.

Edition 8 is designed for developer productivity with tools to help deploy applications quickly, the company said. It is the 'default container' for the NetBeans open source integrated development environment, and Sun's development tools portfolio for Java Studio.

The platform includes two new technologies for building the web tier of J2EE-based applications: JavaServer Faces, which is designed to simplify the building of user interfaces by providing reusable components for use in web applications, and the JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library.

Edition 8 is free for development, deployment and redistribution and is available to download here.