Glassfish in a production environment?

Question

Do you use Glassfish 2 or v3 in a production environment?

Do you find it robust?

Have you ever been able to find a complete set of documentation?

What do you do when you find that Glassfish ignores J2EE standards, like class and anotation scanning?

Answer 1

Glassfish is Sun's reference standard for a J2EE app server. V3 supports the new 3.1 standard. However, it is only a preview. It is currently scheduled to be released on Dec 10, 2009. Of course, it can always be dangerous to be a very early adopter in a production environment. Currently V3 doesn't support JMS or clustering, for example, but they should be in the final release.

I've used V2 in production for about 3 years and I personally like it. The web admin console makes it very easy to manage (http://localhost:4848, admin, adminadmin), and the performance is good. Here's one example, where someone benchmarked Glassfish: Blog. Of course, you should search for more examples and your YMMV. Here's a Sun document for Glassfish to help Tomcat User.

One last thing that I would add is that Sun ships, and integrates, both Tomcat and Glassfish in their Java IDE Netbeans so you can easily switch between the two app servers to test your particular app.

Answer 2

Do I use GF in production? no.

Do I find it robust? yes, but I do not tax it very hard.

Have I ever found a complete set of documentation? I think so... the GlassFish v2.1 docs and the GlassFish v3 docs (http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/prod/gf.entsvr.v3?l=en&a=view)

What do I do when GlassFish ignores the J2EE standards? I file an issue here: https://glassfish.dev.java.net/issues/