>>The team seems to have either no interest or time to fix even P1 issues
I'm sure it's lack of time :)
Perhaps this is an opportunity...like you said, there are a lot of amazing things about glassfish...but if P1 issues can't get triaged in a timely fashion, then management isn't going to let anyone touch it and it'll stay as a toy that developers play with on the weekend.
The road to a commercially viable application server is through corporate adoption of the open source version. I was talking to the redhat guys the other day at a conference, and they're in an amazing market position at the moment. Through diligent attention to their community, they've worked their way into almost every JEE department in Australia...they're in every major bank, government department and insurance company...and much much more. They make their money upselling support (which includes giving you a nice management interface like the one for glassfish). And they have been incredibly successful....because they just walk into these departments (in fact more and more the departments are coming to them) and say "hey, you know that stable JEE server you've been using for years, the one that you already get great free support for, how about a nice UI and free training?" -- boom, sold
Anyway...it seems like I'm not the only one a bit dissapointed with P1 triage...so how do we fix it? What is the bottleneck?
Most bugs go through the following:
1) Submitter communication -- asking the submitter for more information, and working with the submitter to create some kind of test case that consistently reproduces the bug.
2) Bug triage -- once you have a way of reproducing it, searching for a workaround that would allow you to lower the priority, or reprioritizing if it doesn't fit the priority rules?
3) Investigation -- Diving into the code and coming up with a list of likely scenarios and possible place in the code that are causing this issue.
3) Finally, if the bug remains a P1 with no work around then it has to be fixed...which, because of glassfish's complexity, is really not something that's going to be easy for a community member to do in a timely fashion. It's going to fall to a regular committer.
So I guess the question is, if we can put together a team of community members that can make a commitment to the glassfish community to do steps 1, 2 & 3 for all P1 issues, can the we get a team of more senior glassfish members that can make a committment to do step 4 within a timely fashion (24 hours would be ideal, under a week would be necessary).
Thoughts?
--- On Sat, 11/7/09, Markus Karg <karg@quipsy.de> wrote:
> From: Markus Karg <karg@quipsy.de>
> Subject: RE: Dissapointed
> To: users@glassfish.dev.java.net
> Cc: Eduardo.Pelegrillopart@Sun.COM, adamjenkinstmpredirect@yahoo.com.au
> Received: Saturday, 11 July, 2009, 5:18 PM
> Adam,
>
> it's sad to see you going, but I can understand your point
> of view and the trigger behind this step. For professional
> use cases it just is not acceptable to wait for long time
> one P1 fix.
>
> In part, I share your experiences with the GlassFish
> project management. I also reported several bugs, and the P1
> issue among them still is unfixed for months. It is a matter
> of fact that lots of bugs do not get fixed for even years.
> Despite your assumption, as a Sun sales representative told
> me, a maintenance contract does NOT improve that situation,
> as Sun is not obliged to FIX a bug but just to deliver ANY
> workaround (what means, their debt is released as soon as
> you modified YOUR application to get around with the still
> existing bug). BTW, I talked once a week to Sun sales to get
> an offer for a maintenance contract, but after one quarter I
> have given up now -- nobody ever called me back, while this
> was pretended every week.
>
> Even for an open source contributor like me it is hard to
> understand the policy Sun is applying, so I just can
> speculate about the reasons behind this. This is just my
> personal experience and subjective view, but as you wrote,
> this posting shall aim in the improvement of the overall
> management process.
>
> Our company is an ISV. We are providing a Java EE based
> application to a big share of our 1.200+ enterprise
> customers. Several thousands of people are using our Java EE
> based application every day, all over the world. Its
> development started back in 2001 using JOnAS form ObjectWeb.
> There had been lots of bugs in JOnAS, I personally reported
> several dozens of issues, and lots of them had been highest
> priority. In the beginning, the team was exerted to fix at
> least a few of them (but not always those with the highest
> severity). I was told that this is an open source project
> and I shall contribute (more than I already did with all the
> reproduction configs). So I started fixing some of them on
> my own, also I contributed some features. It took a long
> time for each to get into a release, and it seemed a lot of
> paid core members felt offended by the fact that externals
> provide fixes for bugs they reported. After a lof of
> senseless argueing about the fact that it makes no sense to
> provide an open source product if P1 bugs are not getting
> fixed even in the next release, we had to leave the
> project.
>
> This was why we came to GlassFish. In the beginning all was
> shiny. Despite the fact that GlassFish v2 already had
> production stable Java EE 5 support years before JOnAS had,
> GlassFish was much more stable and faster than JOnAS. For
> each question we asked in the forum, there was a useful
> answer within hours to days. GlassFish people all had been
> very helpful and friendly, and it really felt like those
> guys like to help you and appreciate your bug reports as a
> contribution to improve the product's quality. But for
> several months this had changed substantially, at least in
> the purely subjective feeling of a user. More and more of my
> bug reports are not getting fixed, and even worse, a P1
> showstopper I reported is in the queue and NOBODY is working
> on it. I asked two times for a status update, and NOTHING
> happens. The team seems to have either no interest or time
> to fix even P1 issues.
>
> If you ask me what the reason is, then I would name it
> "ORACLE". I could imagine that it is not much fun to come to
> work everyday with the knowledge that your company was just
> acquired by your business rival, and they have a concurrent
> product and have not told anything yet about the product YOU
> are working on or YOUR job. Actually some Sun employees
> directly told me that their product development definitively
> IS stalled due to the ORACLE deal, and they are full time
> workers in a GlassFish sub project. So while I have no
> evidence that GlassFish maintenance is reduced by intention,
> it at least FEELS this way out of the view of the average
> user (in fact I can't find anyother reason why P1 issues are
> untouched for months and Sun sales is not calling me back
> for a maintenance contract offer for months).
>
> I copy this email directly to Eduardo, who (so I hope) has
> some influence on this. GlassFish is a great product and I
> never regret the day I enforced the switch from JOnAS to
> GlassFish. But as your case shows, the maintenance seems to
> have too low priority currently. Professional users do not
> need the latest features, they need stability and
> performance (two things which unfortunately are not sexy
> enough for marketing people, I know; the word "NEW!" is what
> they love, certainly). Unless the GlassFish management will
> invest more in fixing bugs, there will be more people like
> you, which don't want to but actually have to leave due to
> missing stability.
>
> I hope that GlassFish will not trap into the same gap than
> JOnAS did. The JOnAS product is nearly dead. Virtually
> everybody left it for a concurrent product. At some days
> there are ZERO messages in the mailing list. The cause of
> this is exactly the management failures that we see now in
> GlassFish: No answers to customers, no work on P1 bugs,
> leaving bugs open in favour of new features. As a GlassFish
> community member, I really really hope that the GlassFish
> management is concious about the effects of this and
> prevents GlassFish from the same bad end that JOnAS already
> reached.
>
> I think it is at the time that the GlassFish management is
> writing an official statement about the covered problems so
> people know what the reasons are and what GlassFish
> management is actively doing to solve the issues.
>
> Thanks
> Markus
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Adam Jenkins [mailto: adamjenkinstmpredirect@yahoo.com.au]
> > Sent: Samstag, 11. Juli 2009 00:27
> > To: users@glassfish.dev.java.net
> > Subject: Dissapointed
> >
> >
> > Hi All,
> >
> > I have to investigate switching back to JBoss today,
> and I was going to
> > just do the switch and forget about things, but I
> thought that I'd do a
> > post in the hope that my experiences can help out the
> glassfish team
> > and other users. This is a bit of a negative
> post, but please take it
> > in the constructive manner in which I intend it.
> Hopefully my
> > experiences will assist the glassfish team to adapt
> and become more
> > successful.
> >
> > A few years ago, at a Sun conference targeting
> partners and certified
> > architects, a Sun speaker requested that we start
> considering the
> > Netbeans/Glassfish stack instead of
> Eclipse/Spring/Jboss which is by
> > far the market share here in Australia.
> >
> > Because I owe so much to Java and Sun (essentially my
> entire career), I
> > started to experiment with the Netbeans/Glassfish/JEE5
> combination, and
> > initially saw much potential in it, and started to
> champion it.
> >
> > It took a looooong time for clients to take me
> seriously. I finally
> > got my way on a project, and over the last year
> development has been
> > quite good, and Netbeans has been a good platform.
> >
> > Unfortunately, during deployment into production we
> found a pretty big
> > bug in Glassfish v2.1, the stable production
> release. A web tier
> > object won't repeatedly connect over iiop to a remote
> EJB application.
> > This is stock standard JEE, and core functionality
> that JEE developers
> > have been using for years. But I understand that
> bugs exist and it's
> > no ones fault, in fact it's an opportunity to make a
> product even
> > better.
> >
> > So I prepared a test project that reproduced the issue
> and submitted 2
> > P1 bugs 8589 and 8590, along with massive amounts of
> configuration
> > information and an offer to help as much as is
> useful.
> >
> > That was two weeks ago, and after querying why the bug
> hasn't even been
> > triaged, I was told that "it's not clear when we'll
> have time to
> > investigate"...I would understand if this was a P3 or
> P4, or if it
> > involved something on the fringes like using a custom
> JCA
> > connector...but this is a P1 stopping a web tier using
> iiop to connect
> > to an EJB tier...that's bread and butter stuff to a
> JEE developer.
> >
> > Anyway, since development has finished and we're
> preparing to move into
> > production, I've just been given the call to switch to
> back to JBoss,
> > and I can't stall any more.
> >
> > I understand this is an open source project, and one
> could argue that I
> > should buy a service agreement license if I want bugs
> addressed, but
> > one could also argue that open source is a
> collaborative environment,
> > and to be take seriously, you have to be willing to
> meet the
> > expectations of both your paying and community
> partners.
> >
> > Over the years I've posted many issues to the JBoss
> forums (and indeed
> > many other open source projects)...and have been
> involved in submitting
> > many patches to many different projects. JBoss
> has never taken more
> > than a few hours to get back to me on anything greater
> than a P4...and
> > while the answer is not always the solution I wanted,
> at least they
> > investigated and addressed the issue and gave me a way
> to keep the team
> > moving forward. Indeed I think the longest I've
> ever had to wait for
> > significant feedback from an open source project is
> about 3
> > days...until now anyway.
> >
> > I offered to try and fix this issue myself with a
> little direction, an
> > offer that is usually met with gratitude from open
> source
> > projects...but to no avail :(
> >
> > Anyway, it is with a very heavy heart that today I
> slink off to the
> > Jboss site defeated as we plan a migrated back to
> eclipse/jboss. I
> > can't in good conscience recommend Glassfish to my
> corporate clients
> > (most of which are investment banks, govt departments
> and insurance
> > companies), not because of the product itself (which I
> really like, and
> > think it generally easier to develop against than
> JBoss), but because
> > of the uncertainty around it's ability to be used in a
> production
> > environment without a license (many of the departments
> I consult with
> > and teach at have multiple JBoss installations without
> licenses working
> > in production)
> >
> > Anyway, I just thought I'd share my concerns.
> Like they say, for every
> > one person that complains there's a hundred that
> stayed silent. My
> > suggestion would be to spend some time looking at how
> bugs are triaged,
> > or to state as part of the community download in big
> bold letters that
> > preference in bug fixing will be given to paying
> clients (if that's is
> > the case, I have no visibility into things, so I'm
> making an assumption
> > which is possibly incorrect).
> >
> > Thanks for all the help from the list during
> development. I've learned
> > a lot about Glassfish over the last year and will
> continue to track
> > progress of the product, looking forward to the day I
> can use it in
> > production.
> >
> > Cheers
> > Adam
> >
> >
> >
> >
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