The Reference Implementation is a critical piece of any given JSR, this is even more true for Java EE. As the different Java EE 8 JSRs continue to make progress, it is now important to ramp up efforts around GlassFish 5, the open source Java EE 8 Reference Implementation. And today is an important milestone on the way to Java EE 8 as we are publishing the first promoted build of GlassFish 5 , aka GlassFish-5.0-b03.

We are in fact releasing 2 types of GlassFish 5 builds: n ightly and promoted (for both the full Java EE platform and the Web Profile).

Nightly builds have a daily cadence and goes through more limited testing; those builds are on the edge! See here.

builds have a daily cadence and goes through more limited testing; those builds are on the edge! See here. The promoted builds on the other hand have a slower cadence, i.e. weekly cadence, but go through a larger set of tests including (an initial version of) the Java EE 8 CTS. See here.

It is obvious that we are in the early days and everything is in motion: the different specifications, their respective Reference Implementations (e.g. Jersey for JAX-RS, Hibernate Validator for Bean Validation, ...) but also their own TCK. So clearly, we are not claiming that any GlassFish 5 promoted build is fully passing the Java EE 8 CTS ... yet! ;-)





It should also be mentioned that the cadences mentioned below might varies depending on the actual state of a given build, e.g. if the build is broken, it might be delayed or simply skipped.

Given that Java EE 8 is based on Java SE 8+, we are using Java SE 8 as the baseline JDK for GlassFish 5 but the intent to also support Java SE 9 for the final GF5 release. For example, this week promoted build isn't working on Java SE 9 but that is only temporary.