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.

Comments

With all due respect to glassfish

[binaryhermit]

What the hell is a glass fish?

Re:With all due respect to glassfish

[wirefarm]

I figure it might be this little guy:
http://www.theamazingpics.com/transparent-fish/

Re:With all due respect to glassfish

[hawguy]

I figure it might be this little guy:
http://www.theamazingpics.com/transparent-fish/

Ahh, thanks, it's very clear now!

Re:With all due respect to glassfish

[Virtucon]

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

[SeaFox]

I figure it might be this little guy:
http://www.theamazingpics.com/transparent-fish/

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:With all due respect to glassfish

[davester666]

Don't you mean "The Oracle is clouded in mystery, though."...

Re:With all due respect to glassfish

[jellomizer]

I am oversimplifying things a bit, but application servers combined with the language, is used to create web services, which is a web form of remote procedures.

So you can code a procedure such as
public String getname() {return "your name" }
The app server will get all your procedures marked as a web service and their parameters and give a handy dandy XML file to the receiver so they know what to call. Also when you call the web service it formats the XML string to follow a particular standard.

This allows for better scailing of your apps, so you can have web services split across multiple servers so no particular process can slow everything down.

WTF is Glassfish?

[hawguy]

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: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?

[coolsnowmen]

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.

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.

Re:WTF is Glassfish?

[pinkstuff]

Sure, make that two. I have contracted to a company that used it for an extremely high load banking platform. I shouldn't feed trolls, but couldn't help it.

Re:WTF is Glassfish?

[2fuf]

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.

Re:WTF is Glassfish?

[TheRaven64]

There's probably a lot of truth in what you say. Banks tend to be incredibly conservative in their upgrades. I know of a couple that are just finishing their migration from FreeBSD 2.x to FreeBSD 6.x. They didn't even manage to start the upgrade to 6.x until after it was no longer supported upstream, but they pay people to backport security fixes. I know of a couple of others that still do a lot of processing on VMS on VAX, although they do have some Alpha and Itanium boxes. Outside of HFT, performance doesn't matter that much to them, but they really don't like surprises. This is why they tend to be a lot more positive about open source than you might expect from such a conservative industry: they like the idea that you can keep running an ancient platform long after the original vendor goes out of business. Transaction processing volumes grow a lot more slowly than Moore's Law, and unless they need new features they'd much rather keep using the system that they know works with occasional bug fixes when it doesn't than have to switch to something newer.

Re:WTF is Glassfish?

[LDAPMAN]

Tomcat is NOT a web server. It is a lightweight application server that provides a servlet container. That servlet container is a subset of the J2EE spec. It is the subset that roughtly 90% of java apps actually need. Most of the applications running on JBoss, Websphere, etc. don't actually use the extra features available on this platforms.

Hell has frozen over

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't believe it. Right there in the summary.

GlassFish is an open source application server.

drowned

[shentino]

Sun drowned, and oracle was the shark that ate the carcass and after digesting the IP used its bulked up legal muscles to go after google.

Oracle has proven it would rather loot and pillage Sun's corpse than maintain it as a separate brand.

Re:drowned

[Z00L00K]

So what we will expect to see is that sooner or later Java will get the axe too - or be an Oracle internal tool that will cost a crapload of money for anyone outside Oracle to use.

Shitty Answer

[theshowmecanuck]

Here is a better answer (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.

No way!

[Charliemopps]

Oracle bought some software company, provided shitty support for a couple of years, then complained no-one was using or contributing to it and then canceled support for it out of the blue leaving their customers that are using it screwed? eee gads! This has never happened before! Oh wait, that's right, this is what Oracle does with EVERYTHING THEY BUY.

Re:This can't possibly be related to track record?

[bobthesungeek76036]

....It's CDDL licensed, as Solaris was, and the model is "managed community", the way Solaris was ....

I can tell you that Oracle absolutely hates CDDL licensing. It was Mission #1 to abolish all CDDL licensing after absorbing Sun.

You are such a Java apologist

[smittyoneeach]

It was also created to boost chip and disk sales, too.
And frameworks. Don't forget frameworks.