Glassfish?

Douglas, a SUN employee, from the comments asks: "Marc, what do you think about Glassfish?". And I am thinking to myself: not much.

You know I am a bit out of the flow these days, in fact I am looking forward to traveling to EU this week to catch up with a lot of my old JBoss friends on the development side. They have their great mass going on and it is also time for "fetes des vendanges" which is a world class opportunity to get drunk with some of my favorite peoples.

The bad news: with all due respect, I do not think it matters much to JBoss or even the market frankly, what Glassfish does. For the foreseable future (5years) no market share movement will unseat JBoss from leadership. Things just don't move that fast in middleware as you know.

The good news: within the realm of what is possible however, it looks like you guys haven't completely embarassed yourselves yet again with an application server offering. I will believe that grass-root activism within JAVA is probably responsible for what seems to be a well executed strategy. Pat yourself on the back and you get an A for perseverance.

Look at this way: you can have at it all you want with Geronimo and IBM. I think you get to claim a clear #2 position, do you? Good for you. Watch out for IBM though, you know they are big and all. The fact that JAVA employees have outsmarted IBM in building a semi-credible OSS alternative speaks for itself. This is something you should collectively take pride in.

marcf

Comments

douglas dooley said…
Marc,

I appreciate the post, though I am no longer a Sun employee, I can still accept the challenge that Glassfish faces. You are right that it will take some time to convince middleware customers to port/convert to a platform, but I think it ties in directly to why you guys sold out to Red Hat, why BEAS will sell out to Oracle, and why IBM will have to re-write WebSphere (all variations and functionality) with Geronimo...

I wouldn't want to draw you too much in to a debate about the app server market, as you are enjoying time-off in ATL and Europe, but it seems that Glassfish is pretty well-positioned to take market share if/when customers conform to JEE5 and/or move to Solaris and/or move off of WebLogic license costs...

In fact, the bread-and-butter of JBoss has been taking high-paying accounts and giving them sanity over pricing, even though I'll accept that it also has a little to do with technical merit. Unless subsequent customers are Red Hat customers, Sun is going to be picking off those same customers, now...

I really feel that unless BEA and IBM team-up on Geronimo (as Savio suggested), and/or BEA gets bought soon by Oracle, this is going to be a race between JBoss and Glassfish to fulfill the SOA needs of Fortune 1000...

thanks for the mention, but remember, I am only an external proponent of Sun's app server program,

douglas dooley
September 27, 2007 at 9:20:00 AM PDT
Unknown said…
We run projects with Tomcat, Bea Weblogic WLX and WLS, jboss and websphere for years now. We choosed glassfish V2 instead of Weblogic for a bigger project this year, because of price/CPU, features and the excellent community and sun developer support instead of Weblogic and we're still happy !

Thorleif Wiik
September 27, 2007 at 9:37:00 AM PDT
Roy Russo said…
I agree with the chinese guy.
September 28, 2007 at 7:12:00 AM PDT
Dr. Roy Schestowitz said…
Hi Marc,

Off topic: I hope to see you coming back to being active in the open source software world.
September 28, 2007 at 5:21:00 PM PDT
Army No. Va. said…
"this is going to be a race between JBoss and Glassfish to fulfill the SOA needs of Fortune 1000..."

Glassfish is an app server...not an SOA story. Need a lot more than Glassfish to do the above... I know Sun does have other OSS projects that do more than just JEE.

Also, JBoss is a brand name for multiple products, not an app server. JBoss >> Glassfish. JBoss Application Server competes with Glassfish.
September 30, 2007 at 6:11:00 PM PDT
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