> Obviously, you don’t want to have 20 editions of app
> server to download/install. Another thought might be
> to have the Lite installer with no modules, and an
> installer package that contains additional modules
> and has the ability to let the user installing the
> app server choose which modules are installed.
And, frankly, all this seems like a lot of work to reduce the download footprint. Not that I'm in general favor of "bloat for bloats sake", but is the download size that big of an issue for Glassfish adoption? It's no Jetty, but it's not THAT big, not by todays standards and bandwidth expectations anyway.
I happen to think the current GF install is really straight forward and simple. It it a button click? No, but it's much more flexible and faster (IMHO). It's biggest issue being, perhaps, setting up a Windows service (which I've never done).
Now, that doesn't mean there shouldn't be some mechanism to be able to strip Glassfish. For example, developer wants just the Servlet modules, perhaps for the embedded case, then they should be able to readily create such an "install" (for lack of a better word) from the master.
Does that mean every single module in the update center should be included with GF? No, but, at the moment, most of that stuff is really third party anyway, and not related to the core of glassfish.
I think it has been a feature of, and I believe should be a continued goal, to have Glassfish have a great "Out of box" experience in terms of simplicity of install, and completeness of package.
Power users should have the flexibility to play musical plugins, but out of the box, we should have the full functionality of the system, and it should be "obvious" to downloaders that is what they're getting. Getting presented with a myriad of Glassfish packagings I think is more harm the good, as it confuses new adopters and, even worse, confuses support and forum questions.
Now, when someone says "I have Glassfish 2" we pretty much know what that means without having to enumerate ever single detail. Sometimes it may come down to the build number, but even that's rare.
I don't want to see folks posting "Where's my EJB" because they inadvertently downloaded a "servlet only" version, or somesuch thing. Inevitably it'll take 6 posts to finally figure out that's what the user did.
Another view is compare the "OS X" user experience and expecations to the "Windows Vista XYZ Edition" user experience.
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