Today, GlassFish 3.1 is released.
The major improvements over the 3.0.1
release are support for clustering and availability and centralized
administration.
This makes the GlassFish Application Server a production-ready piece
of middleware that fits perfectly in an end-to-end commercial offering.
When Oracle announced it would acquire Sun, many people were sceptic about
the future of GlassFish. In some scenario’s, GlassFish would “only” serve
as the reference implementation for current and upcoming Java
Enterprise specifications. Many feared that clustering, which was part
of GlassFish 2.1 but not of GlassFish 3.0.1 (which major achievement is
a full implementation of the Java EE 6 specification) would never be
added to the GlassFish 3 family.
While being the reference implementation for Java EE 6 is far from
trivial, the potential of GlassFish is much higher. Compared with most
other application servers, GlassFish is very lightweight. And now, with
the support for clustering and availability, GlassFish is also
very robust, scalable and reliable.
Compared with only a couple of years ago — or compared with
previous versions of the Java Enterprise specification — a number
of things have changes. There is more attention now to simplicity and
extensibility, without jeopardizing the enterprise-grade features like
transaction support, messaging,… that critical enterprise applications
expect.
There is not much that you can do with more expensive application servers
that can’t be done with GlassFish.
GlassFish is now available in 2 flavors: a
free,
community-supported version and a commercial, Oracle supported
distribution.
For developers that like to develop on the edge, the community-supported
version is great. The source code is free and available, and is very
readable.
For companies that have critical business running on application server
middleware, the commercially supported Oracle GlassFish server is an
interesting option. Community support in GlassFish is great, but in some
case commercial professional support is desirable. Oracle provides this
support on Glassfish, and a growing number of companies (including
LodgON) make their expertise with
GlassFish available in the form of professional services.
I did some work with a number of Glassfish instances in a cluster,
and I’m pretty excited about it. We have a project in the pipeline that
will use GlassFish 3.1, and I’m very eager to learn about other
professional, large-scale and business-critical deployments on
GlassFish.
Johan's blog 