David Yu asked How to Port a Custom Valve from Apache Tomcat to GlassFish and he and Jan carried a conversation in this Mail Thread. The Valve interface in GlassFish was changed to Flatten Valve Invocations in a Pipeline; the changes needed to adjust your custom valves include some signatur changes, and some changes in the invocation flow. Jan has captured them in this FAQ Page in the GF wiki.

Straightforward instructions on how to install OpenSSO on Apache Tomcat (5.5 and 6.0). See Robert's Writeup.

Daniel posted a few weeks ago this blog entry about a code camp he and others have been running for ISVs to port and develop their applications on the GlassFish Application Server. Don't be put off by the page being in German, all of the GlassFish Workshop documents are in English and very good IMHO. They cover from GlassFish fundamentals such as basic installation steps to much more advanced details about how to adapt applications and their packaging for GlassFish.

Here's a list of those documents :
• Getting started, Introduction and Migration.
• Resource Management & Call Flow Monitoring.
• Clustering & Load Balancing.
If you're more into following slides, here's a good deck.

Wolfram, the author of JSP Tutorial describes in two notes how he moved that site from Apache Tomcat to GlassFish. The first one covers Virtual Servers in GlassFish. This was necessary to run multiple apps in his box (provided by 1x1). The second shows how to use asadmin to Add Resources to be used by his apps. Thanks, Wolfram!

Regarding the image... Andrew Sherratt argues for a follow-up to the Neolithic Revolution based on Secondary Products from the domestication of animals. Yeah, a bit convoluted, but I'm following a revolution theme for the migration articles... :-)

Sekhar's Migrate2GlassFish project is beginning to make progress under Sekhar's direction. Check out his Introduction Note and his latest entry: Migrating From Tomcat to GlassFish. We are interested in your feedback on what is useful to help you migrate to GlassFish.

The Migration Tool for GlassFish/SJS Application Server has been available for some time now. What Sekhar is announcing is the Open Sourcing of that tool which is GlassFish-specific and picks up where the AVK (Java EE 5 only) left off. The new homepage for this migration tool is https://migrate2glassfish.dev.java.net/.

Other resources include Overview, FAQ, and Documentation.

The tool currently does not support the latest and greatest versions of application servers, but that's not very important given it is meant to help people move their older applications over to GlassFish. Finally, just like the AVK, this is "just a tool", so while it can save you some precious time, it probably cannot claim 100% effectiveness.

JavaWorld has an article entitled JBoss, Geronimo, or Tomcat? Three open source Java application servers compared. It's unfortunate that they did not include GlassFish but Masoud has attempted to address that through his latest blog entry; Check it out!

We probably should write some comparison articles of our own and submit them for publication. Maybe after GFv2 UR1 goes out we will find the time to do it.

Added: Also see the discussion at TheServerSide.COM, and the comparisons at TSS and Wikipedia.

• Community: Closing on Tomcat?, New SCA, Hudson Podcast, GF@FOSS.IN • Real-Life Stories: GF at the Airport • GF Know-How: SSL, Provisioning, Seam and Maven • Experimental: Alternate Mac JVM • Comet: with IceFaces, with DWR • SailFin: ATT's ECharts • OpenESB on JavaSE and JBoss; New OpenDS Build

The number of posts at Users @ GlassFish for November was 1359, which is our second-best number, after last month's 1480. This is pretty good as many US-based people traditionally take off the whole week of Thanksgiving. I was curious about how the mail activity would compare with that of Tomcat, so I went ahead and created charts for Tomcat-USERS (small chart at left, also see Large Chart) and Users@GF (Large Chart). Many disclaimers apply, and a true head-to-head comparison is not applicable, but the trend is very good.

Which Web services stack is integrated in GlassFish, TmaxSoft JEUS 6 and WebLogic Server 10, supported on JBoss, works on Tomcat 5.x, Jetty, Java SE, and now also work on Tomcat 6.x as well ? Metro is the answer and the list of containers keep growing. Metro can be easily installed on Tomcat 5.x using the installation script with the download bundle. An updated directory structure in Tomcat 6.x require a minor update to the script though.

Rama describes the change required to run JAX-WS samples on Tomcat 6.x. And my blog describes how to install Metro bundle on Tomcat 6.x to develop a Secure, Reliable and Transactional Web service endpoint. We will make these changes as part of the installation script so that you don't have to worry about version specific changes.

Let us know if you have tried Metro, or any of its component, on any other container.

There is a thread at the GlassFish Forum on doing deployment-specific WebApp Configuration with a mechanism similar to that of Context.xml in Tomcat. This was at least partially addressed by RFE 2439 and, to spread the word out, Amy just described the facility in some detail. The solution in GlassFish allows global configuration as well as per-virtual host configuration. Check it out and see if this works for your needs. If not, post on the forum/ email thread.

Covalent recently published some benchmark results on the scalability of 3 popular Servlet containers: Tomcat 6 using the native APR, Jetty and GlassFish. The results are good for the three, but they favor TC 6 when using a very large number of connections. One danger with performance tests is that is is really hard to make accurate comparisons, despite everybodies' best intentions. For example, inside Sun I've been involved in comparisons between the Web Server and GlassFish and the results are affected by details like how many requests, what response time, what percentage of successful responses, how much memory, what tuning parameters, etc. That is why there are organizations like SPEC and benchmarks like Web2005 and SPECjAppserver (and even those have their own issues).

The Covalent piece is doing a good job in that it is dispelling the myth that Servlet containers do not scale, because it is forcing teams to provide better out of the box performance (Java SE 6 did a great job there) and because I think everybody will be more careful measuring performance. I'd expect improvements on all these fronts in the near future, in the meantime, here are some additional pointers you may want to check out...

• AB Considered Harmful
• Configuring Grizzly for Performance: Part I, Part II
• Comments from Greg W regarding Jetty in that Covalent article.

Regarding the picture, I chose Mark Twain because (a) he popularized the phrase Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics and (b) he is such a great guy that we should have him somewhere in TheAquarium, but please do note that I am not saying that the covalent blog are lies! :-)

Roger (at Ninth Avenue Software) recently compared Tomcat and GlassFish in his blog - I think in part because FigBird runs on GlassFish. Since this is a popular topic, Jason Lee then proposed to push it to a more stable location at the GlassFish Wiki, now open for your contributions. I suspect that per-area product comparisons may be more manageable, so I created an umbrella page for it and the the WS Stack Comparison; feel free to add other comparisons.

Yet something else to work on in preparation for GlassFish v2 beta.

Wouter at AMIS Technology has a new blog entry explaining how to call from EJBs running on GlassFish from Tomcat using a recent GlassFish V2 build. The blog is fairly detailed and uses screenshots from NetBeans but it should work with any of the other IDEs that Support GlassFish and Tomcat (like MyEclipse and IDEA). I suspect a number of folks will be interested, so Check It Out!.

Ken and Jim are travelling to ApacheCon US next week to talk about GlassFish. They will host a booth, give out T-shirts (we should design a new T-shirt - maybe using CafePress), and Jim will be hosting a BOF Wednesday night at 8pm on GlassFish for Tomcat Users.

Jim has been involved in Tomcat since the early days, so this should be both informed and informative, and thanks to Ken for the tip.