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Friday August 08, 2008
GlassFish at Americas Sales Meeting I've been in the Washington D.C. area the past few days extolling the virtues of GlassFish to the America's sales force. The good news is that the GlassFish session, an 8:00am affair, was packed. I must say that I was pretty darn surprised. Sales reps have *dozens* of products they can focus on, yet GlassFish drove a full house (60-70). Here's why:
- Customer pain. These days we often hear the phrase "pain at the pump" to describe how we feel about rising fuel prices. It's no different for how customers feel about how much they are paying for license fees at a time when the economy is in question. Now is not the time to raise prices, it's time to be more responsive to customer pain.
- MySQL synergy. The business momentum behind the MySQL acquisition (inside and outside of Sun) is quite amazing. When you have a database, something needs to CRUD the data (I didn't know CRUD could be a verb either). When you have an application server, data needs to go somewhere. GlassFish and MySQL provide quite the one-two punch, without hitting below the financial belt.
- Open Source - as in Freedom. Not just financial freedom, but the elimination of vendor lock-in. Customers feel beholden to closed-source products. Customers do not feel beholden to open source communities. Buy only when you need to. Eliminate vendor lock-in. Sales now realizes that open source is a facilitator, not a competitor, because customers still want 24x7 support to reduce risk and downtime.
- Transparency - Transparency facilitates trust. The GlassFish community is about as transparent as I've seen a community be. Sales enters an environment where a we have already established some level of trust and credibility. Their role is to extend that trust into a win-win business relationship.
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What is the advantage of Glassfish over Apache?
Why isn't Sun investing more energy at pushing PostgreSQL?
Posted by UX-admin on August 09, 2008 at 10:48 AM PDT #
Glassfish might be a good product but for big companies to use it. Might be a better idea to have it as a plug-in for apache.
Posted by Nick on August 09, 2008 at 10:33 PM PDT #
UX-admin, are you asking about Apache HTTPd or Apache Geronimo? As for PostGRES vs MySQL, that's a bit out of my area. As for your PostGRES question, I am spending more time with MySQL because I can tap into their resources (and vice versa). As an FYI, GlassFish supports PostGRES already.
Nick, thanks for the question. GlassFish today can be used with mod_proxy: http://weblogs.java.net/blog/mriem/archive/2008/01/apache_ssl_mod.html. Let me know if this is what you were aiming for.
More detailed use cases might help. Dynamic languages? Static vs dynamic content?
Thanks!
Posted by John Clingan on August 11, 2008 at 10:49 AM PDT #
Apache httpd, of course. What is the advantage of a glassfish server compared to Apache httpd?
Posted by UX-admin on August 12, 2008 at 12:30 AM PDT #
UX-admin, for a Java shop, GlassFish makes a lot of sense. Built-in clustering with centralized management of distributed instances help as well. These benefits can increasingly be leveraged for dynamic languages such as (J)Ruby on Rails, Groovy/Grails, Jython/Django, etc.
Posted by John Clingan on August 12, 2008 at 02:15 AM PDT #
Got it. So if I run httpd + PHP5 on a cluster, I don't need Glassfish at all.
Posted by UX-admin on August 15, 2008 at 02:25 AM PDT #
You don't *need* GlassFish, but some do use GlassFish to run PHP because of IT standards, centralized management, clustering, etc. There are issues with supporting C-based libraries, so it is not a solution for everyone.
The primary benefit, IMHO, is for enterprises that already have a Java EE infrastructure (and perhaps a .NET infrastructure), and don't want to manage another (PHP) infrastructure. They can simply deploy PHP apps to their existing GlassFish deployment. I know wordpress and Drupal have been run on GlassFish+PHP (via Quercus).
Sample posts:
http://blogs.steeplesoft.com/quercus-on-glassfish-via-the-update-center/
http://blog.jdevelop.eu/2008/02/17/install-glassfish-v2-with-php5-and-running-on-port-80/
http://blogs.steeplesoft.com/glassfish-php-and-wordpress/
http://blogs.sun.com/alexismp/entry/php_in_glassfish_first_steps
Posted by John Clingan on August 15, 2008 at 08:41 AM PDT #