We used to use JBoss 4 and switched to GlassFish V2 just over a year
ago. The most obvious difference is administration. Whenever I needed
to learn something new in JBoss I had to search google, scour blogs, and
piece together bits of information to build new XML or plain text
files. In GlassFish you never have to see XML or plain text files.
There is a web based admin console that you can browse around and
discover things you didn't know GlassFish could do. When you get used
to the web admin console and know what you're doing with it then you can
start looking at the command line tool called asadmin. Everything you
can do in the web admin has command line equivalents. I've had to use
it several times to script administrative tasks. For me, administering
GlassFish is much more pleasant than JBoss.
I also used to have problems with JBoss on Windows 2003 Server.
Whenever we'd reboot Windows, for some reason ports that JBoss wants to
use were taken temporarily because some parts of it would fail to start,
which caused cascading failures and huge stack dumps in the logs. The
solution was to restart the JBoss windows service after Windows finished
booting. I don't know if it still has that problem or not?
We've also had a problem with GlassFish on Windows, but we later
discovered that it is a known bug in Windows 2003's TCP/IP stack that
affects any Java application using NIO asynchronous sockets. You run on
Red Hat, so that won't be a problem.
Another thing I like about GlassFish is that it gets the new Java EE
features first. You can already tinker with some Java EE6 features in
GlassFish V3.
We don't cluster, and have only one application installed on it so I
can't comment on your other criteria.
I like what JBoss is doing with Seam, WebBeans, JPA, EJB 3.x, RichFaces,
etc. I'm glad they are around and I may target their AS in personal
projects but for work I choose GlassFish.
Ryan
Bill Davidson wrote:
> This is copied from my previous posting on the Glassfish advocacy list
> because I'm told that not many people read that list and so Glassfish
> users would be a better place for this. I've gotten a couple of good
> responses so far but would love to see more.
>
> ***********
>
> My company currently has a software-as-a-service sales application which
> runs on Tomcat. We are looking into doing web services and looking
> at EJB's. We'd like something free-as-in-beer. I am looking into
> JBoss, Glassfish and Tomcat w/OpenEJB. I am willing to consider others.
>
> I'm googling around trying to find good comparisons but most of what
> I find seems to be out of date and not very detailed. I know the picture
> changes fairly frequently. I'm trying to find out what it is right now.
>
> Since this is the Glassfish advocacy list, I'm expecting to find a lot
> of people who can answer the question: Why should we choose Glassfish
> over the others? At least, maybe someone can point me to a web page that
> can answer that? I can't seem to find it from the Glassfish home page.
> If you'd like to tell me why we should not choose Glassfish, that would
> be appreciated too.
>
> Reliability is the #1 biggest issue for us. Our app is used globally by
> thousands of people simultaneously. We need to be up 24/7. Downtime
> at 3am here is downtime at 3pm somewhere else. It costs us and our
> clients money and that's a serious problem.
>
> We also want to get into clustering for fault tolerance, failover and
> load
> balancing. We currently use multiple servers but our clients know about
> the multiple servers and when things get slow, they log out and log back
> into another server. We want to get away from that for obvious reasons.
>
> My boss is leaning strongly towards JBoss, because we run RedHat servers
> and he thinks that may mean better support since we already have a
> support contract with RedHat. He also likes JBoss because it has been
> in heavy production use for a long time. I'm a little more open minded
> and I am under the impression that Glassfish is a bit more up to date
> with the latest JEE standards. I am also under the impression that it
> has been heavily used in production environments a for a while now.
>
> BTW, my boss and I are the primary software developers as well as
> app server admins of the system. It's a small company.
>
> Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
>
> --Bill Davidson
>
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