Application server project
GlassFish is an open-source Jakarta EE platform application server project started by Sun Microsystems, then sponsored by Oracle Corporation, and now living at the Eclipse Foundation and supported by OmniFish, Fujitsu and Payara. The supported version under Oracle was called Oracle GlassFish Server. GlassFish is free software and was initially dual-licensed under two free software licences: the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) and the GNU General Public License (GPL) with the Classpath exception. After having been transferred to Eclipse, GlassFish remained dual-licensed, but the CDDL license was replaced by the Eclipse Public License (EPL).
Overview.
GlassFish is the Eclipse implementation of Jakarta EE (formerly the reference implementation from Oracle) and as such supports Jakarta REST, Jakarta CDI, Jakarta Security, Jakarta Persistence, Jakarta Transactions, Jakarta Servlet, Jakarta Faces, Jakarta Messaging, etc. This allows developers to create enterprise applications that are portable and scalable, and that integrate with legacy technologies. Optional components can also be installed for additional services.
Built on a modular kernel powered by OSGi, GlassFish runs straight on top of the Apache Felix implementation. It also runs with Equinox OSGi or Knopflerfish OSGi runtimes. HK2 abstracts the OSGi module system to provide components, which can also be viewed as services. Such services can be discovered and injected at runtime.
GlassFish is based on source code released by Sun and Oracle Corporation's TopLink persistence system. It uses a derivative of Apache Tomcat as the servlet container for serving web content, with an added component called Grizzly which uses Java non-blocking I/O (NIO) for scalability and speed.
History.
Epoch of Oracle.
The commercially supported version of GlassFish was known as Oracle GlassFish Server, formerly Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server, and previously Sun Java System Application Server (SJSAS) has a history, along with other iPlanet software, going back to Netscape Application Server. This includes code from other companies such as Oracle Corporation for TopLink Essentials. Ericsson's SIP Servlet support is included, the opensource version of it is SailFish, developing towards JSR-289. In 2010, the difference between the commercial and open source edition was already quite small.
Forks.
Over the years several companies forked the GlassFish project and created their own distribution:
Payara Server.
In response to Oracle’s announcement to end commercial support for GlassFish, a fork called Payara Server was created and released in October 2014. Payara Server is open source under the same licenses as the original Oracle GlassFish (combined GPL2 + CDDL) and has optional commercial support from Payara Services Ltd., via the Payara Enterprise project.
References.
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