Unfortunately the name Glassfish has been pretty tainted by now. If you say your platform is based on Glassfish they'll automatically assume you're an old donkey not up to date on latest Java technologies like Spring Boot.

That's what the article is trying to deflect, isn't it?

Many people rely on vibes from the past instead of updating their knowledge with the current info. It's true that some companies in the past attempted to taint GlassFish to promote their alternative products. And there was nobody to defend GlassFish and keep it up to date.

This is different now, with GlassFish at the Eclipse Foundation, the OmniFish company behind it and providing enterprise guarantees, and GlassFish itself modernizing with fast startup, runnable JAR, support for latest Java and Jakarta EE, Jakarta Data and NoSQL databases.

Why would you compare Eclipse GlassFish instead to Payara or Wildfly/JBoss? Anyway, that bickering between JEE application server vendors is what caused Spring to win. It doesn't matter it has update churn that is almost as bad as in JS ecosystem, just the fact you don't have to think about AS helped adoption. Well that and significantly easier testing. And Spring Data with generating queries from method names. And you can't recruit people with JEE knowledge anyway, they all know only Spring.

Spring and JEE (or Quarkus) are very similar, from the viewpoint of an application developer both have the same JAX-RS REST and Hibernate/JPA API's.

IMO the kind of person who only knows Spring and doesn't understand modern JEE is exactly the kind of person you don't want to recruit.

Spring won. Why would anyone want to learn the standard aside from it being a standard that few people use? Spring itself is a wildly adopted standard. It is a semi open standard in that anyone can use it freely, but in that it's not supposed to be implemented by others.

The same is true for Micronaught or Quarkus. Learn the frameworks. But they are not a new open standard.

> Spring won. Why would anyone want to learn the standard aside from it being a standard that few people use?

People don't really talk about Jakarta EE as "the standard". Haven't been doing that for quite some time.

You learn it so you don't hand Spring the ultimate monopoly. I thought we all didn't like monopolies? Why give Broadcom one?

There's nothing to be gained by picking a winner, especially if it doesn't really matter because the important APIs are the same.

Newer frameworks like Quarkus are specifically built for container usage and applications built with it are a bit faster and smaller than Spring boot.

Except people keep forgetting they implement the standards on their very foundation.

Yet the WebAssembly bros are into replicating application servers with Kubernetes pods running WebAssembly containers, go figure.

(glassfish is a Java application container, provides DB, http server etc for apps using the standardized interfaces, now more in the micro-profile corner away from the oldern days JavaEE tar pit)

I use jersey+glassfish to build very small micro-profile applications. It's stable, small and works.

Not a fan of the HK2 dpendency injector though. Maybe that's my general dislike of how convoluted the spec and implementation (of EE di) is.

I hate how sprawling the (other) implementations are, no it is not ok to pull in 90mb dependencies to support things I don't need. These app servers tend to grow into huge uncontrollable messes. Nobody uses standalone containers anymore and forcing people to pull in all or nothing for the embedded version is just asinine engineering.

Probably would be a good idea to include at least a single sentence somewhere near the top explaining what the heck a glass fish is.

Thank you for your feedback. I'm the author of the article and will review how I can improve this.

However, at a brief glance back at the article, The second sentence in the first paragraph says it's an "application server". Further below the illustration image, there's a text in bold that says "Eclipse GlassFish is now a production-ready, enterprise-grade platform".

So I'm really curious, whether the article didn't make it clear, or there was a lack of interest on your side.

probably this article isn't for you if "glassfish" isn't a familiar term.

if curious (or fomo) it would have taken you about 15 secs to find out what glassfish is, which is still probably 15 less than what you wasted on this mini rant. from there it's up to you to go down the rabbit hole.

Exactly, I had to read way too far before giving up because I have no idea what Glassfish is.

In the Java world it is rather common to use something called application servers. These are meta-applications that provide your applications an environment with things like database abstractions and the like, as well as admin interfaces.

It solves some of the same problems you might reach for Kubernetes or OpenShift for, your application gets access to external resources in structured ways and you get to look at dashboards.

GlassFish is an example of such an application server. WildFly is more common, and is the artist formerly known as JBoss. If you have some knowledge in the enterprise Java ecosystem you can quickly and easily (or maybe not, it depends) deploy your creations into these.

> what the heck a glass fish is.

In Biodiversity, a glass fish includes a few group of Asian fishes that show crystal transparent bodies to hide from predators. Specially when young. They are vertebrates that evolved transparent muscles. Two gens are kept in aquariums: Parambassis ranga and several ghost catfish from gen Kriptopterus.

We can assume that the programmer likes aquariums. The word Yakarta is not random, as is related with the catfishes distribution.

A java framework, like Springboot

In a way, yes, GlassFish is a Java framework. Although also much more.

It allows running and manage applications on a server, which provides resources to the applications. And it also allows building standalone Java applications, with the server embedded in it, in a way that you would expect from a framework.

On top of that, it provides standard Jakarta EE APIs, so your applications don't need GlassFish, you can run them on other servers too. Or you can easily migrte from other servers and frameworks to GlassFish if you like it more. And you can learn Jakarta EE APIs even before you will use GlassFish, or hire somebody who already knows it even though they never used GlassFish.

er... surely it's a Java application server?

(i.e. in the same space as Jboss/Wildfly, WebSphere, etc)

Historically, it was also the reference implementation application server for J2EE.

Nope. From the glassfish.org web page: "Eclipse GlassFish is a lightweight yet powerful open-source application server that fully implements the Jakarta EE platform."