Oracle Ends Commercial Support For GlassFish

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As a part of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, the corporate also acquired the GlassFish application server project. Since its launch, GlassFish users have enjoyed commercial support for the most recent releases of Java Enterprise Edition, but that’s not the case.

Earlier this month, Oracle announced that it might be ending commercial support for GlassFish and Java EE. In other words, there’ll be no GlassFish Server 4.x with commercial Java EE 7 support. There’ll, however, be an open source version with GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4.1 launching in 2014.

So, what’s an enterprise using GlassFish to do? Oracle says that every one your Java EE 7 needs will now be fulfilled by the company’s WebLogic Server service. It says that the the compatibility between the 2 server types is high and so that you can have the ability to transfer your goods over to WebLogic very quickly.

For additional information, here’s what Oracle recommends GlassFish Server customers do to start the move to WebLogic:

  • Applications developed to Java EE standards could be deployed to both GlassFish Server and Oracle WebLogic Server
  • GlassFish Server and Oracle WebLogic Server have implementation-specific deployment descriptor interoperability (here and here).
  • GlassFish Server 3.x and Oracle WebLogic Server share quite a lot of code, so there are so much of configuration and (extended) feature similarities. Shared code includes JPA, JAX-RS, WebSockets (pre JSR 356 in both cases), CDI, Bean Validation, JSF, JAX-WS, JAXB, and WS-AT.
  • Both Oracle GlassFish Server 3.x and Oracle WebLogic Server 12c support Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Coherence, Oracle Directory Server, Oracle Virtual Directory, Oracle Database, Oracle Enterprise Manager and are entitled to support for the underlying Oracle JDK.

    • Before you’re thinking that this suggests Oracle is giving up on Java EE, you want to dial it back a chunk. The corporate says that’s it committed to both Java EE and GlassFish greater than ever. On the contrary, it says that focusing entirely on GlassFish Open Source Edition may also help its teams “to be more fascinated with the Java EE platform.”

    [Image: GlassFish/Twitter]
    [h/t: JavaWorld]