Proposing Glassfish to customers

Question

With Sun being taken over by Oracle, Oracle will arguably gain control of Glassfish.

I do understand that Glassfish is community driven but most of the contributions do come out of Sun at this time.

Its a great App Server and perfect for many cost-sensitive customers. However, if Oracle decides to pull the rug from under our feet on this, we could be in serious trouble with our customers.

For solutions (applications) with a life time of around 5 years would it still make sense to suggest Glassfish as the application server?

Answer 1

Oracle can't really "pull the rug out" as such, realistically the worst they could do is to not allow any of their staff who are contributors, contribute as part of their role at Oracle. I personally don't think this will cause all that much disruption on the project even if they did that.

Answer 2

It depends:

1. Who are your customers?
2. Are you deploying to customer sites?
3. Does the customer even let you choose the JEE container?
4. Does the Customer buy the application or a service?
5. Does it really matter which JEE server your application is deployed to?
6. Does it even need to be a JEE container, could you use Tomcat instead?
7. Can you easily test/support multiple containers?

The spectrum runs from the customer couldn't care if your application is powered by 2 hamsters in a wheel up to specifying you must work in Websphere 5.1.2.3.4.5.

Hedge your bets. Continue to recommend Glassfish if you think that's most appropriate, but have a fall-back solution.