Under development for more than a year after Java EE 6 was approved by the JCP, the JBoss Application Server 6.0 is now production ready.  The GA release brings built-in support for all of the great technologies that Java EE 6 brought with it: JPA 2, Bean Validation, CDI, EJB 3.1, Servlets 3.0, JSF 2.0, and others.  I've compiled a list of what's new from all of the available executive summaries throughout the milestone and candidate release stages.

What's New?

• JBoss Embedded AS
• ShrinkWrap
• EE6 Multi-namespace injection
• HornetQ integration
• VFS 3 integration
• Single POM Dependency for all the AS runtime
• JBoss OSGi integration
• Servlet 3.0
• JPA 2.0
• RESTEasy 2.0
• Microcontainer 2.2
• Management consoles deployed on demand
• EJB 3.1 - Singleton, War support, Async, Advanced Timers, Embedded, JNDI, EE injection
• New Apache CXF-based JBossWS stack
• XA Recovery
• SwitchBoard integration
• EE 6 Web Profile certification
• Weld 1.1
• Added compatibility with the most updated JBoss technologies

That's a whole bunch of stuff!  What better way to kick off 2011 than with an update to your application servers?  

The next big step for JBoss should be the completion of the Seam 3.0 Framework, which will bring together an even larger stack of JBoss tooling.  With the release of Java 7 coming next year, you can expect efforts on JBoss AS 7 to start ramping up as well.