Adding:
GlassFish asadmin/gui commands are also exposed via a RESTful interface so you can programmatically manage GlassFish.
Strong OSGi integration, hybrid OSGi/Java EE app support, and the embedded API also come to mind. GlassFish will also be the first to Java EE 7 support, including Servlet 3.1.
Plus, the more Java EE features you use, the smaller your war file :-)
On Apr 5, 2013, at 11:50 AM, Shreedhar Ganapathy <shreedhar.ganapathy_at_oracle.com> wrote:
> Hi Blake
> There are possibly several reasons for you choose GlassFish that may be of benefit here - its hard to list every feature here but I will cover some. A few broad brush benefits you will see fairly quickly are as follows (without knowing about your specific use case beyond what you have stated in your email)
>
> 1. GlassFish comes with a command line utility called asadmin that provides a rich set of management and configuration commands to enable you to use a non-GUI mode to manage your installation spanning several machines.
> 2. GlassFish comes with an easy-to-use Administration GUI console that covers most, if not all, functionalities of the asadmin command line interface - the GUI provides you a browser based approach to manage server instances in an administration domain beyond a single compute node.
> 3. One can cluster multiple instances and have a deployment targeted to the cluster with one CLI command or a click on the Admin GUI console. These instances can be located on a network of machines.
> With an SSH Daemon enabled on each machine, the creation, installation and runtime lifecycle management of these instances can be done through the domain administration server seamlessly.
> 4. One can front the cluster instances with a software or hardware load balancer to support both a url for user traffic access to your application(s) and balancing high traffic loads to your site thus providing service availability and scalability
> 6. One can enable replication while deploying (availability-enabled flag or check box) and get the advantages of making the conversational session state highly available for your web sessions (and EJB should you ever need to go there) thus going beyond service availability to user session availability.
> 7. Several security features from supporting ssl for encryption to supporting security realms for your applications.
> I am sure I am missing some other major features but this is hopefully a good start.
>
> The above is not exhaustive and we would welcome you to try the server out and give us feedback based on your experience and for improvements.
>
> -Shreedhar
>
>
> On 4/5/13 11:05 AM, Blake McBride wrote:
>> I understand that GlassFish offers support for technologies that Tomcat does not (EJB, I think, comes to mind). However, I am not using those additional technologies, and that difference doesn't matter to me at this time. Tomcat has been working well for me for several years now. The reason I am interested in GlassFish is because, I believe, GlassFish scales better, and perhaps easier, in large installations. So, my question is this, is GlassFish better positioned to support large installations, such as more than one physical computer, serving up a single URL?
>>
>> Also, what other areas of GlassFish might be reason for me to switch?
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> Blake McBride
>>
>