On Jul 11, 2009, at 12:18 AM, Markus Karg wrote:
> 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.
>
This is a bug which we can fix if still interested.
> 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.
This is a very valuable thread. We have some work to do to set
expectations up front, and to fix some of our processes.
>
>
> 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.
>
This is a tough balance. While I don't like to see no answer, we do
have to prioritize. It gets back to us setting expectations up front.
> 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_at_yahoo.com.au]
>> Sent: Samstag, 11. Juli 2009 00:27
>> To: users_at_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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>