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Usage of GlassFish as a platform for applications and portal

Last modified by Opinca Mihail on 2010/03/18 22:16

GlassFish is an open-source application server developing at Sun Microsystems (now Oracle). It implements the conceptions of the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) platform.

The actual version is GlassFish v3 released on December 10, 2009. This version fully supports Java 6.

GlassFish exists in two editions, GlassFish Application Server and Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server. Both editions are open-source and totally free for use. The Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server is provided with paid support, consulting, and training, but its use is nevertheless free of charge. Under the terms of either the CDDL or GPL licenses for GlassFish, the developers are free to redistribute the GlassFish code as they wish, even if the code is embedded in the developed applications.

Sun recommends installing Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server on production systems. No major differences exist between the functionality of both editions.

Use of GlassFish guarantees the following advantages:

  • data and code integrity as the database and the business logic implementation reside on a central server or a small number of servers; in particular, this facilitates updates and upgrades, and therefore excludes the incompatible manipulations over data by old program versions;
  • centralized configuration;
  • higher grade of security as the access is controlled at a central point;
  • performance as the server automatically balances the traffic permitting to service successfully even the heavy usage environments;
  • as the summary of all these benefits, the total cost of ownership is lower.

GlassFish is reported as seamlessly and successfully used with more than twenty Applications including Jasper, PHP, XWiki, etc. GlassFish is used in industrial scale. The success stories list refers, e.g., to the car maker PSA that is most famous for its two brands: Peugeot and Citroen.

There exists the open source, high-performance Web platform based on GlassFish that is called GlassFish Portfolio. In addition to the GlassFish application server, the GlassFish Portfolio includes the following components:

  • Sun GlassFish Web Stack;
  • Sun GlassFish Web Space Server;
  • Sun GlassFish ESB;
  • Sun Enterprise Manager.

GlassFish provides rich features to manipulate over XML data. It uses StAX and JAXP for XML parsing, and JAXB APIs for XML binding.