Oracle Announces GlassFish Roadmap

Posted by Charles Humble on Mar 26, 2010

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There's been some concern amongst GlassFish users since Oracle's takeover of Sun Microsystems closed in January this year. Oracle possibly compounded the problem when it began to position the GlassFish application server as a "departmental" server, whilst WebLogic remained targeted at enterprise customers requiring performance and scalability. This is a similar strategy to that used by IBM with its two WebSphere Application Server flavours (Community Edition which is based on Apache Geronimo, and WebSphere Application Server). But many suspected that this would result in "enterprise" features, such as clustering support, being dropped from GlassFish. Perhaps reacting to this James Gosling, now CTO of Oracle's client software group, pointed out to an audience at the TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas that the GlassFish application server provided the first implementation of EE 6, and that the server is used in data centres and downloaded about a million times a month:

People run lots of large-scale sites on it. Don't think of it as toy. It is definitely not a toy.

Yesterday Oracle published the roadmap (pdf Document) for GlassFish version 3 and the news is positive. GlassFish version 3.1, expected this year, will offer centralized admin, clustering and Coherence support.

Looking further ahead, Oracle plans a version 3.2 product for 2011 that will see improved cluster support, better integration with Oracle identity management, virtualization support, JavaEE 6 specification updates and some limited Java EE 7 early access APIs. Version 4, slated for 2012, will support Java EE 7 and will start to share a common server platform with WebLogic.

Another area of concern was around licensing. Oracle have stated that they will continue to develop GlassFish as open source software (mostly under GPL/CDDL as now), and will continue to offer the product as an open source offering called GlassFish Server Open Source Edition. In addition, Oracle will offer a commercial distribution (Oracle GlassFish Server) which will include closed source add-ons and full support from Oracle, in much the same way as Sun did prior to the acquisition.

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   Why?

   by Vic _

   There are nice servlet engines out there, no need for this Sun EJB thing. Even Oracle has an another EJB server.

   Reply

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   Re: Why?

   by paul perez

   It seems that Vic never used Glassfish App Server.
   
   From another side, it is shame that Oracle is not attentive for Glassfish ESB (www.open-esb.org) as it is for Glassfish Server. May be there is not enough open-esb user or may be it is too dangerous for its own ESB product fusion.

   Reply

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   Re: Why?

   by Luis Espinal

   There are nice servlet engines out there, no need for this Sun EJB thing. Even Oracle has an another EJB server.

   
   
   If you said so </sarcasm>.
   
   Glassfish is a lot more than a EJB container (not to mentioned it can be stripped down for any needs). The entire glassfish project presents a collection of general-use frameworks for component-based development, efficient I/O and protocol building, scripting and so on.
   
   I actually made a prediction a few weeks ago over a couple of beers that this would happen. I would actually predict that Oracle will increase integration of their technology (jrocket) with WebLogic and all the stuff that is provided by Glassfish. It only makes sense.
   
   It'd make sense for Oracle to even go as far to "commoditize" its JEE products to increase sales of its database products. Such a move would simply increase their Java customer base.
   
   From both technical and business perspectives, it certainly makes sense.

   Reply

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   Re: Why?

   by Patricia LaRue

   Oracle has been working on a "partner" relationship with Java for over 10 years. Anyone working with an Oracle IDE for PL/SQL in 1999 would have been keenly aware of that relationship. Sure I was disappointed when they bought Sun (mostly for fear of the loss of open-source) but at the same time hopeful that improvements would come in many unpredictable forms. So, I agree with Luis. To me it makes perfect sense that Oracle would take the best of both worlds and try to integrate the best of their products.
   
   As a huge fan of both Oracle and Java (for important reasons that are beyond this discussion), I'm still hopeful that Oracle's purchase of Sun will bring lots of goodness. At least I can hope for that.

   Reply

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   Re: Why?

   by Pedro Duarte

   I would like to know what Oracle has to say about this too!!
   
   Can you please enlight me on something: Glassfish ESB is the best (ServiceMix based) implementation combining both Mediation (ESB) and Orchestration (BPM/BPEL) enterprise class tools (talking about Netbeans here) in all open source history?!
   Is there any other similar option on that level?

   Reply

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   Re: Why?

   by Gurkan Erdogdu

   Maybe time to visit siwpas.mechsoft.com.tr

   Reply