adam bien's blog

GlassFish Became The Killer AppServer And Then Changed The Name 📎

GlassFish became the Killer Appserver. GlassFish was one of the favorites in green field Java EE projects--the vast majority of my clients used GlassFish in production in 2013.

Oracle dropped the commercial support for GlassFish and a mass-exodus to WildFly and TomEE started.

The C2B2 company offered commercial support in late 2013. During JavaOne 2014 a "New Fish On The Block"--Payara was announced. Payara is a GlassFish 4.1 clone maintained at https://github.com/payara/Payara, heavily patched and further developed by the community.

I'm closely watching Payara since JavaOne 2014. Some observations:
  1. Developers behind Payara are present at major conferences (JavaOne, Devoxx). C2B2 (the company behind Payara) organizes vibrant London GlassFish User Group meetings and events
  2. Payara's developers are highly skilled and focussed, but open for contributions at the same time
  3. Payara community is very responsive and reacts quickly to issues
  4. The first binary release is available http://payara.co/downloads with fixes and interesting enhancements (e.g. hazelcast integration)
  5. A few hundred commits were already contributed by the Payara's community is used since JavaOne 2014
  6. Payara is as open source as GlassFish--the same license
  7. Payara is lean, clean and easy to install
  8. Payara's branding is appealing (never underestimate marketing)
  9. Effectively Payara is Java EE 7 compliant, commercially supported, application server.

A small issue: caused by higher version number, NetBeans currently does not recognize Payara as GlassFish. The issue is already addressed and can be easily fixed by renaming a JAR in the distribution: 


mv glassfish/lib/install/applications/__admingui/WEB-INF/lib/console-core-4.1.151.jar 
   glassfish/lib/install/applications/__admingui/WEB-INF/lib/console-core-4.1.jar

See you at Java EE Workshops at Munich Airport, Terminal 2 or Virtual Dedicated Workshops / consulting