Sun Microsystems today launched its answer to the LAMP stack, the GlassFish Portfolio, which it termed "the most complete, open source, high-performance Web platform" available.

"The portfolio is a collection of several products addressing different aspects of Web development," said Paul Hinz, chief architect for GlassFish Portfolio. It includes the GlassFish Application Server, a piece of middleware that manages high-volume requests for application services and connects an application to outside resources, such as databases.

In addition, it includes the GlassFish Web Stack, made up of the Apache Foundation's Tomcat, a lightweight server for executing Java commands or Servlets on a Web server; Memcached, a system used by YouTube and others for distributing data across multiple Web servers; Squid, a proxy server that captures and caches repeated requests; and Lighttpd, a secure, high-speed Web server. The stack is designed to be able to run the PHP and Ruby dynamic languages as well as Java.

In addition, the portfolio includes the GlassFish Web Space Server, a portal software set that reflects Sun's decision to combine its portal development team with the Liferay open source project. Both Liferay developers and Sun portal developers are now committers, or final code arbiters, on the Liferay project, said Hinz. As part of the GlassFish stack, Liferay in the form of GlassFish Web Space Server supplies general-purpose enterprise portal functions.

The portfolio includes GlassFish ESB based on Open ESB, a lightweight enterprise service bus for Java service deployments. The ESB ties applications together and delivers application responses to the Web.

The last piece of the portfolio is Sun Enterprise Manager, a system for monitoring portfolio operations that includes Simple Network Management Protocol support. The Enterprise Manager can detect when a piece of the stack stalls or suffers an underlying hardware failure.

Kevin Schmidt, GlassFish Portfolio's product manager, said Sun is looking to offer the portfolio in a manner similar to the popular open source MySQL database. "Our major direction with GlassFish is to align with MySQL," he said. The two will be offered as an integrated set, ready to run after download.

The starting price for GlassFish Portfolio is $999, ranging up to $8,999 for platinum-level support.