Advantages/disadvantages of Glassfish v3 Prelude vs Springsource dm server for Web applications?

Question

Both of these appservers are at least in part OSGI based. One (Glassfish) is obviously Java EE while the other isn't. Now I'm at the stage of choosing a platform for a new project and the natural choice is Glassfish v3 Prelude. This does raise the issue of perhaps we should be using S2AP instead.

The question then is this: does the springsource dm server offer any compelling reason to use it over Glassfish? And vice versa.

Answer 1

Java EE app servers have distributed transaction managers. If that is at all important, then may want to see if SpringSource dm includes such.

It is possible to do XA TX with Spring-Framework, is just that you're left on your own to locate a suitable XA manager and integrate it.

Course XA TX have very much fallen into disrepute. Most folks try to avoid them like the plague. Amazon.com, for instance, does not use them.

We currently use Spring-Framework and Tomcat in combo. We do all our own integration. Lots of folks have made similar middle-tier stack choice. We do get tied to Spring-Framework APIs - just like Java EE folks get tied to Java EE/EJB. Don't let Spring rhetoric fool you about that one. However, it continues to remain open source accessible to community of users.

Once you go Java EE, you get tied to a particular Java EE vendor as it's difficult to move between implementations. EJB3 supposedly will ease this, but would bet it will still be a major undertaking to switch Java EE app servers.

Frankly Spring-Framework provides more useful APIs than the Java EE/EJB standard and it is innovating at a more rapid rate.

Answer 2

This is an old thread but I thought it would be useful for people coming across this (as I did) to share the recent GlassFish OSGi enhancements, mainly in the area of OSGi Enterprise RFC's : http://wiki.glassfish.java.net/Wiki.jsp?page=OsgiDashboard

Of course there's also the @Resource-based injection of OSGi Declarative Services that's been there since v3 in December '09.