yeah, i'm answering to a bit old thread, but it's the first google result for the "glassfish vs jboss" query. I was wondering what does "reference implementation" mean. I read from time to time thas gf is the reference implementation. First I thought that it is some kind of "closest to standard" implementation, that when you want to write your own java enterprise server implementation it must act exactly like gf. But cayhorstmann has just said the opposite: there should NOT be any "best" implementation that we would consider to actually BE the standard because we would also take its quirks for standard. So what does reference implementation mean?
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