Extended Enterprise Application Platform and Java SE 6 together ...

As Scott Oaks has pointed out, the Application Platform SDK (formerly known as Java EE SDK) has been released. One of the things that quickly catches the eye is on-demand attach for JConsole that Java SE 6 has. The idea is that you can now avoid the non-intuitive Java System Properties (that were essential in Java SE 5) and still manage and monitor a Java SE 6 VM, on-demand. So all you do is:

Download the platform (which has a folder name of "SDK" for some reason).

Start the default domain by doing asadmin start-domain

And when you start JConsole, you'll see the default application server domain VM right there as shown in this graphic. When you click on "Connect", it connects to the application server VM and you can monitor the entire application server VM. All the MBeans, threads, classes, memory, operating system is visible.