Gerrtjan has an interesting blog entry that I just came across from back in April that lists a few points that I wasn’t aware of with the Glassfish EE5 app server.
The most interesting of this points is his point #1 – ‘Glassfish is lazy’ – by this he is referring to a feature that the appserver only initializes the features you have configured and/or are using by your deployed apps. For example – if you deploy a webapp with no EJBs, only the servlet container is initialized, so you don’t pay a penalty for running small, simple apps on the server. So in this respect even if you are testing small webapps there may not be any compelling reason anymore to use Tomcat by itself?
There has been a huge amount of news coverage and blog posts on Glassfish in the past year, which prompts me to ask the question, “Where is JBoss?”. Since their buy out by RedHat they seemed to dropped off the face of the earth. Have their frequent and ‘full of themselves’ blog posts been tamed by corporate RedHat? Or do they have something up their sleeve that they have been working on that they are about to announce with great fanfare? Floyd Marinsescu on InfoQ.com is asking the question “Could Glassfish become the next major App Sever?”. Take a read of his post on InfoQ.com