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David's canned history of App Servers at Sun prompted me to fill in some of the gaps.
There are a handful of us at Sun who've been around long enough to see the entire history of Sun's App Server product line. I joined in 1999 (as part of the Forte Acquisition). At that time Sun had at least 3 Application Servers.
Over the years - in internal presentations I've tried to capture the full genealogy of the App Server at Sun but I've only really ever done a half-assed job - through this blog entry I hope I've captured it correctly. Once and for all. If I haven't - and you know better leave a comment. The picture is supposed to illustrate the code heritage - again, this is mostly from memory - corrections welcome.
I haven't tried the latest version of GlassFish yet - but I will when time permits. Even though I'm not directly associated with the App Server team anymore - I can't help noticing the attention that GlassFish is getting - it's enjoying a success that all the previous versions never did. The reasons - firstly I think the product has come on leaps and bounds - starting with a new code base in 2004 was pretty painful but it paid off - for example performance has improved significantly with every release since. And open sourcing in 2006 made an enourmous difference - it allowed Sun to connect to people we hadn't been able to before.
Note - the big red crosses indicate end of code line - not official EOL date.
Significant Events (mostly from the Wayback Machine or Wikipedia)
1995 NetDynamics Founded
Kiva Software Founded
1997 Kiva wins PCWeek's Best of Comdex award for "Best Internet Software" (sells Kiva App Server for $35k / CPU)
Netscape Acquires KivaSoft
1998 Sun acquires i-Planet (marketed a Secure Remote Access Product which found it's way into Sun's Portal Server) [more]
Sun acquires NetDynamics
1999 AOL acquires Netscape
J2EE 1.2 SDK Released by Sun
Sun and AOL form the Sun | Netscape Alliance
Sun acquires Forte Software Inc. (cross platform IDE and run-time) [more]
Sun acquires NetBeans (Java IDE) [more]
2001 J2EE 1.3 SDK released by Sun
2002 Sun Netscape Alliance ends, Sun continues to market iPlanet products alone. AOL Continues to market subset of products.
2004 J2EE 1.4 SDK released by Sun
2005 GlassFish project launched (I seem to remember Eduardo favored ZebraFish, Jim got his way though)
2006 J2EE 1.5 SDK released by Sun
