Does anyone have experiences with both in the real world? How do they compare in terms of performance (memory usage, speed, etc)? Stability?
Does JBoss Seam work well on Glassfish?
Does anyone have experiences with both in the real world? How do they compare in terms of performance (memory usage, speed, etc)? Stability?
Does JBoss Seam work well on Glassfish?
(disclaimer: I work at Sun and I am in the GF team)
I agree that Seam works fine on GlassFish; see blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/tags/seam
GFv3 is quite different than JBoss 5; in particular:
GFv3 is designed to be very modular; services start on demand, there is an update center repository, etc. GFv3 is significantly smaller than JBoss 5 and will start much faster. JBoss 5.1 GA is listed as 130MB; GFv3Preview is 50MB. GFv3 starts in a couple of seconds; JBoss in tens (you should try the startup for your own platform).
There are other differences, some inherited from GlassFish v2 like the graphical admin console, or the admin CLI.
A more direct comparison for JBoss 5 would be the GlassFish v2 releases, which are based on Java EE 5. The latest release in that family is GFv2.1, with a GFv2.1.1 release scheduled in October (see blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/entry/schedule_for_glassfish_v2_1).
Sun also provides patch releases of GlassFish (akin to RedHat's support for JBoss); see blogs.sun.com/glassfishforbusiness and sun.com/glassfish.
A number of things from my own experience:
From my point of view GF is easier to administer, is a better solution from purely technological point of view, but it is far less popular and has uncertain future.
I am not connected in any way with RedHat/JBoss or SUN/GlassFish, my company (erudis.pl) is supporting and developing for both servers.
I started developing a Seam application on JBoss and after a few months tried to get it working on Glassfish. I found the Glassfish enviroment very counterintuitive. I had to fix some strange errors on GF and I could not find any information on the web so after a few days I gave up and went back to JBoss. So personally I would not recommend Glassfish.
It's strictly what you're used to. I found configuring and using JBoss to be about as pleasing as trying to shave with a jagged spoon while riding a unicycle with no seat. Glassfish however, just seems to work.
My choice is Glassfish: it is faster to start-up, to deploy web applications. the Admin console is very accurate, moreover it is both graphical and command-line. Now it is fully-supported by Oracle, its future is not uncertain any more. It is based upon OSGi: it is really modular. You can install Spring-osgi applications easly. You can freely choice between Eclipse Link , Apache Open JPA and Hibernate without pain. It is greatly integrated in NetBeans (and, of course, Eclipse).
On the other hand, Jboss is more widespread and thus it is easy to find job on it (IMHO because it is an old App Server; glassfish is relatively new).