Is the GlassFish project still alive?

Question

I wonder if the GlassFish project is dead or still alive? I am realy a fan of glassfish from the early first days. I started projects with GlassFish2 and have lot of customers using GlassFish3. Since a few months I try to migrate some of my projects to GlassFish4. But I did not really have success. The problem for me is, that I can't find support form the community. It's hard enough to find a forum. To me it looks like Oracle had did a lot to stop any community driven development. In the mean time I migrated my main project to Wildfly 9. In contrast to Oracle's GlassFish, RedHat's Wildfly is working perfect. There is a vital community, where you can ask questions and discuss open issues.

So I wonder what is the sense of the GlassFish project? Is it just the place where the 'reference' implementation can be hosted. A reference implementation which is (and maybe should not) be productive ready?

What did you think about this project?

Answer 1

GlassFish is absolutely still alive, there was a new minor release just a few days ago. It is still the reference implementation for Java EE, so you can expect GlassFish to be around for as long as Java EE is.

Oracle's other application server, WebLogic, still doesn't even fully support Java EE 7 - both they and IBM seem to have similar strategies of maintaining stability in their "full-fat" releases while being more "bleeding edge" with GlassFish for Oracle and the Liberty Profile for IBM's WebSphere.

It's also important to take note of the Payara project, which provides support for GlassFish, but also is actively looking for and fixing bugs in the upstream codebase. Some of the bugs which have been fixed in Payara have now also been incorporated to the latest GlassFish 4.1.1 release.

Finally, your point about whether or not GlassFish is "production ready" doesn't take into account the amount of GlassFish which is comprised of other projects, like Apache Catalina, Jersey, EclipseLink, Weld and others. These are the same technologies used in JBoss EAP, WebLogic, Tomcat etc.

It's difficult to get a good idea of activity in the GlassFish project, but it's easy to see how active Payara is.

Edit: David Delabassee has tweeted that the first nightly build of GlassFish 5.0 is now available to download