Hi, everyone! I have a choice to do: choose a application server for my company! And I need some help. Glassfish or JBoss?
Thanks.
A:
Oracle has pretty much said that Glassfish will be meant to be a development environment and referenceImpl only, where WebLogic is the production server. So if you're talking about what to actually run your apps on, JBoss seems obvious. Why choose a platform to do something that the vendor tells you not to do?
Affe
2010-06-11 19:34:53
Can you provide evidence of this claim? Never heard such a black/white position from Oracle side and and we use GF in prod.
ewernli
2010-06-11 19:37:57
http://weblogs.java.net/blog/arungupta/archive/2010/01/28/glassfish-strategy-oraclesunI suppose diff people can get out of if what they will. The message I hear is "We're keeping it around, but WebLogic is our principal platform going forward." Certainly no reason to try to migrate away if you're in production, but it's enough for me to be skeptical of starting up a new project with GFish as the target production server.
Affe
2010-06-11 20:33:48
@ewernli: Don't worry, this answer is **wrong** and this has been publicly clarified in March 2010 by Oracle. See the [GlassFish Roadmap](https://glassfish.dev.java.net/roadmap/) for all the details (including dispel of FUD like this). GlassFish will NOT be just the RI, Oracle wants and is contributing to GlassFish, GlassFish 3.1 will be a real enterprise grade app server (it will offer centralized admin, clustering and Coherence support), GF is definitely not a tool. GlassFish 4 will even share some code with WebLogic.
Pascal Thivent
2010-06-11 23:20:06
A:
AFAIK JBoss is much more adopted in production deployments than Glassfish, but this doesn't necessarily mean it's better.
I'm using JBoss for all of the projects I work on and although I generally like it, there are points about it that I totally hate - that being the chaotic documentation, the constant critical regressions and lack of emphasis on backward compatibility. Other than that - JBoss (especially 5.x) is an excellent application server.
Glassfish has better administration console and documentation, support for Java EE 6(in Glassfish 3) and better documentation. It lacks however the vast community that's gathered around JBoss and this is it's single biggest drawback.
In the end of the day I'd go again with JBoss, but this is always subjective...
Bozhidar Batsov
2010-06-11 19:39:26
A:
Without knowing your environment it's pretty impossible to give proper advice, i.e. What do you mean by "best"?
Make a list of what's important for you/your company when looking for an application server. Don't use the feature lists of a particular server when doing this! Give each item on the list some sort of weighting. Score the respective servers against the items on the list and see how they stack up.
When you're filling these details in you might be able to ask some more pointed questions here on SO re. whether one server is better than another in a particular area. Once you know what the important features are you might, for instance, find that you're better off with a tc-Server/Spring solution rather than either of these two.
Trevor Tippins
2010-06-11 19:40:49