GlassFish Roadmap

In March 2010, Oracle shared plans for GlassFish with the community (see this PDF slidedeck or click on the image). This covered the few community changes as well as the upcoming releases such as support for clustering and more in GlassFish 3.1 in 2010. The following is the related set of frequently seen questions (additional question can be sent to the project USERS mailing list or to the corresponding forum).

•Where can I find details on specific features?
Detailed plans for GlassFish 3.1 can be found here.
• What will happen to high availability and clustering capabilities of GlassFish, will they stay open source and included in the download bits?
Yes, centralized admin and clustering will be in the open source version.

• Will the community edition of GlassFish remain full featured?
Yes, the Open Source version is fully featured, including full JavaEE 6 support (not just the Web Profile) and things like administration and clustering. Shoal-based, in-memory replication is part of this. The Oracle distribution of GlassFish is just the Open Source version + branding elements + Closed-Source AddOns.

• Will Oracle Fusion Middleware be certified to run on GlassFish? For example, Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Identity Management, Oracle WebCenter Suite, etc?
Oracle's decision to port the upper level components of Fusion Middleware to GlassFish is based on demand from our commercial customers to make such functionality available on different Application Servers. As a commercial product to date, we have not heard demand from our customers to make these components available on GlassFish - hence we do not have a product plan to do so today. We periodically re-assess that demand with our customers, user groups, and advisory boards and if this demand changes significantly we will make that available.

• Will GlassFish be certified on and interoperability tested Oracle Fusion Middleware?
Yes. GlassFish will be certified on Oracle's Java Virtual Machines (JRockit and Hotspot) as well as other major JVM providers. Certifying and integrating GlassFish with Coherence is on the roadmap of GlassFish Server 3.1. In areas such as security and web services, Oracle will be doing interoperability and compatibility testing with Oracle Fusion Middleware.

• So even though Coherence is not in open source, clustering will be available in the open source edition?
We are building shoal clustering to work on top of Grizzly and replication will be part of Shoal project and be part of v3.1 as open source.

• Are add-ons available for evaluation or should one buy the license to test the product? It used to be that GlassFish Enterprise Manager was not available for download...
You will be able to download the add-ons features under an evaluation license as they will be part of the binary download available from oracle.com, much easier to evaluate than previously. For GlassFish 2.x add ons will be a separate download.

• What is the target date for 3.1?
The target date is later in 2010. We can't give exact date but we do have to ship the 3.0.1 and 2.1.2 ("100 day") releases first.

• Will GlassFish be certified with JRockit VM?
Yes, GlassFish 3.x will be certified with JRockit VM. See previous answer on Oracle Fusion Middleware.

• Is there any indication if GlassFish 4 will remain Open Source?
Yes, GlassFish 4 will remain Open Source.

• Didn't the Roadmap presentation mention GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 2.1.2? What happened to it?
Yes. The original roadmap mentioned both 2.1.2 and 3.0.1 releases. These releases were driven by short-term internal Oracle requirements for versions of existing releases that conformed to Oracle's corporate requirements like branding. Upon re-evaluation, we discovered there was no need for a 2.1.2 release - this means we can dedicate more resources to the v3 releases. There have been no changes to the plan for 3.0.1.

• The roadmap presentation mentions GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 3.2? Where does it stand?
With the increased scope of the 3.1.1 release to respond to community and customer concerns we pushed out the release date by a couple of months. At the same time Java EE 7 and thus GlassFish 4 (its reference implementation) are date-driven releases and leave little time for a major release like 3.2 which had PaaS and virtualization as its main themes in the interim. It is very likely that the features planned for 3.2 will simply be postponed to 4.0, with the added benefit of being a standard Java EE 7 product.