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Jul
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I was just reading Andreas Schaefer's entry about GlassFish and though I would respond to some of his concerns.
Though Platform Edition doesn't compete feature-wise with JBoss - for the target market it has most of what it needs; ie. for 90% of the typical JBoss / Tomcat deployments. It also has some features not found in other products - JavaServer Faces, Web Services Security, full J2EE 1.4 IDE - for example.
PE has other advantages over the FREE / OSS competition - it's faster and possibly more robust; it's more appropriate for a broader range of skills (ie. simple installer, easy to use admin GUI console, great docs. and tutorials). It's also fairly well accpeted in the market - most people have at one time or another used the SDK.
In terms of feature parity, I think it would be natural for some features from the commercial products to sediment into the free product over time - specifically a simple HTTP load balancer and some rudimentary multi-machine management - to make it more appropriate for large clusters. [note, these are my thoughts - they are not future plans]
Are we too late with GlassFish ? Well, no-one would disagree that it would have been good to do this a couple of years ago but I don't think that would have changed the landscape much - I think there would still be competition with JBoss and Geronimo. I also don't think that JBoss has the market for OSS cornered - they have been operating in a market segment with little or no competition to date - their mettle will be tested in the coming year.
One thing is for sure - the next couple of years of Server Side Java are going to be fun. I think the pace of innovation (driven by the competition) will only increase and Java will gain more ground. Vendor's will be aggressive in pushing their platforms; with not only free tools but also free run-times - it will be increasingly hard to justify a non Java platform.
Competition is a good thing.
PS. Andreas - welcome to the team - hopefuly we'll have the opportunity to work together in the future - fresh perspectives are all always valued at Sun.
Java, Geronimo, JBoss, Glassfish
