Oracle Kills Commercial Support For GlassFish: Was It Inevitable?

An anonymous reader writes "Oracle acquired GlassFish when it acquired Sun Microsystems, and now — like OpenSolaris and OpenOffice — the company has announced it will no longer support a commercial version of the product. Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. said in an interview the decision wasn't exactly a surprise: "The only company that was putting any real investment in GlassFish was Oracle," Milinkovich said. "Nobody else was really stepping up to the plate to help. If you never contributed anything to it, you can't complain when something like this happens." An update to the open source version is still planned for 2014." GlassFish is an open source application server.

Re:WTF is Glassfish?

[IllusionalForce]

I think the important part is that GlassFish is the reference implementation of all Java EE features.

Re:WTF is Glassfish?

[Rhyas]

It's not terribly popular these days but was at one time, and it's still used in a lot of enterprise production environments these days. It was Sun's premier "Application Server" when it came to hosting products like their Portal software, Java CAPS, Access Manager, Identity Management tools, and various other JEE-level applications. It has enterprise level features like clustering, centralized management and deployment, etc. all built into the product. (Has had them for many years, though now you can get similar functionality in things like Tomcat) It was essentially Sun's version of JBOSS, WebLogic, or WebSphere.

It's no surprise that Oracle is drop kicking it though, it's very much a cheap competitor to WebLogic/Oracle Application Server.

Re:WTF is Glassfish?

[CuriousKumar]

.

From my experiance, Glass fish is ONLY used by people following the JEE tutorials from oracle (using netbeans too). It is not a competative-performant-scaleable JEE Application server.

You seem to have limited experience then. Glassfish is the reference implementation of Java EE standard and therefore it is used in JEE tutorials. BTW, IT IS used extensively in many enterprise application, including very demanding stuff like stock broking and trading (I have designed it for a large customer myself who serve more than million trades a day, so I can speak with some authority). This is a big news exactly for the same reason. There are many enterprise customers who paid money to get commercial support on Glassfish. Now those companies will either have to depend of the community for support or switch to other commercial options like WebLogic or WebSphere or JBoss EAP.

Shitty Answer

[theshowmecanuck]

Here is a better answer [slashdot.org] (and it's not mine). The 0.1% figure is disingenuous. People normally don't user app servers like Glassfish as web servers. They usually serve back end web services (which doesn't really count as a web server in my book, despite the terminology used), and back end Java Enterprise services (like Enterprise Beans, and Persistence Layer objects). In my experience, while many use Tomcat for web services, it is a pain in the ass to use for any seriously large sized projects. And it is kludgey and tougher to configure unless you like playing with Apache style configuration files (meaning they are about as clear as Apache documentation). Glassfish is built with all the services required and integrated for doing most anything you need to do with an app server, no added packages needed. People who will tell you Glassfish isn't very good are also those who still think Netbeans is no good, when in fact it now eclipses Eclipse for just working without fucking around with adding plugins. And it works very well. Also Glassfish has built in facilities for horizontally scaling/high availability.