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Sun Application Server 9.0 PE Open Sourced

Posted by timothy on from the big-ship-slow-turn dept.

farble1670 writes "Sun Microsystems has released their Application Server 9.0 PE platform as open source, under the code name Glassfish. Version 9.0, when complete, will be J2EE 5 compliant. Code is released under Sun's CDDL (common development and distribution license), the same license used to cover the Open Solaris, the open-source Solaris operating system. This is most likely a response to the popular open-source application server JBoss, which has cut into profits for Sun as well as other major application server vendors such as BEA and IBM."

3 of 31 comments (clear)

  1. Ruby? by jericho4.0 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I wonder how people with a financial stake in Java app servers feel about Ruby on Rails?

    --
    "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
    1. Re:Ruby? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Back when I was a "web developer", we dabbled in J2EE (servlets & JSP, really) and it generally was just fine. However, after I left that project, the other developers tried to go whole-hog J2EE with enterprise beans and everything with WebLogic.

      Well, they talked professional and all and tried to be proud of their creation, but one thing they ran into was too many layers of abstraction. Their database was failing, and WebLogic's implementation ate all the important debugging information! They spent weeks trying to understand why their connection pools would go bad without warning and other problems.

      I don't blame J2EE at all, either. What I blame is that they took on too much stuff (resume stuffing, I think) too quick and without enough caution and patience. They didn't take the time to make the abstractions work for them rather than against them.

      J2EE is also one area where I really really wished the contract would have provided two weeks of real training. There is just too much documentation, and a nice primer would have made all the difference. But, of course, programmers are gods and don't need training. Just read the book and look at these examples in JavaPro. I quit that company after a few years.

    2. Re:Ruby? by Ogerman · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I sort of see rails as occupying a middle ground between PHP and a java app server. You get the structure of a java framework with the ability to know stuff out of PHP.

      That's a surprisingly accurate assessment for supposedly being "uninformed" about the topic. I have PHP and Java background and have recently researched Ruby a bit. At this point, Ruby would now be my choice over PHP for all but the lightest-weight jobs. If Ruby improves in the area of templating and component-based UI frameworks, it could knock PHP down quite low on the list and start to compete in the low-end Java arena.

      Java app servers, on the other hand, still run in an arena that the scripting languages can't begin to touch and by architectural nature never will. What is a more interesting comparison is modern lightweight Java tools (like Spring/Hibernate) vs. Ruby. These Java tools have a ways to go regarding loosing additional XML baggage, but they are still a significant improvement over current heavyweight J2EE app servers. What is most interesting is the convergence. Java tools are rising to the challenge of becoming simpler. Even the EJB 3.0 and J2EE 5 specs are heavily geared towards this goal. The question becomes: If Java tools get closer to the simplicity of scripting languages without losing the power of their architecture, where is the incentive to use scripting languages? Conversely, the scripting languages have simplicity nearly mastered but they have no headroom architecturally.