Oracle Ends Commercial Support For GlassFish

As part of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, the company also acquired the GlassFish application server project. Since its launch, GlassFish users have enjoyed commercial support for the...
Oracle Ends Commercial Support For GlassFish
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  • As part of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, the company also acquired the GlassFish application server project. Since its launch, GlassFish users have enjoyed commercial support for the latest releases of Java Enterprise Edition, but that’s no longer the case.

    Earlier this month, Oracle announced that it would be ending commercial support for GlassFish and Java EE. In other words, there will be no GlassFish Server 4.x with commercial Java EE 7 support. There will, 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 all your Java EE 7 needs will now be fulfilled by the company’s WebLogic Server service. It says that the the compatibility between the two server types is high and that you should be able to transfer your goods over to WebLogic in no time.

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

  • Applications developed to Java EE standards can 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 bit of code, so there are quite a bit 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 think that this means Oracle is giving up on Java EE, you might want to dial it back a bit. The company says that’s it committed to both Java EE and GlassFish more than ever. In fact, it says that focusing entirely on GlassFish Open Source Edition will help its teams “to be more focused on the Java EE platform.”

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

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