Oracle Kills Commercial Support For GlassFish: Was It Inevitable? 125
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.
WTF is Glassfish? (Score:4, Interesting)
The Wikipedia article is no help for someone that isn't familiar with Java appservers:
GlassFish is the reference implementation of Java EE and as such supports Enterprise JavaBeans, JPA, JavaServer Faces, JMS, RMI, JavaServer Pages, servlets, etc. This allows developers to create enterprise applications that are portable and scalable, and that integrate with legacy technologies. Optional components can also be installed for additional services.
Built on a modular kernel powered by OSGi, GlassFish runs straight on top of the Apache Felix implementation. It also runs with Equinox OSGi or Knopflerfish OSGi runtimes. HK2 abstracts the OSGi module system to provide components, which can also be viewed as services. Such services can be discovered and injected at runtime.
GlassFish is based on source code released by Sun and Oracle Corporation's TopLink persistence system. It uses a derivative of Apache Tomcat as the servlet container for serving Web content, with an added component called Grizzly which uses Java New I/O (NIO) for scalability and speed.
Why would someone choose Glassfish over Tomcat, JBoss, or one of the commercial alternatives? Can someone explain it in plain english without requiring links to a dozen different projects?
How popular is it?
Re:With all due respect to glassfish (Score:4, Interesting)
There are still a few out there that use it and it was much more popular when it was Sun who ran things. Now with Tomee, JBoss etc. It's an also ran.
Re:With all due respect to glassfish (Score:5, Interesting)
I figure it might be this little guy:
http://www.theamazingpics.com/transparent-fish/ [theamazingpics.com]
Ahh, thanks, it's very clear now!
Well Sun recognized how much people appreciated transparency from a company. The Oracle is shrouded in mystery, though.
Re:WTF is Glassfish? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:WTF is Glassfish? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sounds like this is wonderful news for you guys. You both have clients that are loaded with money, and who desperately need Glassfish support for their production environment.
And now Oracle stops offering support? Dude, this is the best business opportunity you'll get in your life. Quit whatever you're doing and start offering Glassfish support yourself. If it's really that big a deal, companies will be all over you.