Tim Richardson with the University of Utah shared a brief review of the university's recent move from Weblogic to the GlassFish open source application server with GlassFish Evangelist Arun Gupta. The free application server is an attractive alternative for many higher education institutions who have to contend with budget constraints while maintaining high quality IT services for its users.

The public, coeducational research university located in Salt Lake City, Utah, offers more than 100 undergraduate majors and more than 90 graduate degree programs. As of 2008, there are 21,526 undergraduate students and 6,685 graduate students.

Richardson was attending the 2009 JavaOne conference to learn more about the new frameworks, app servers, web servers, etc. noting that "anything that Sun does we kind of look at it."

The university is now running GlassFish 2.1 in production, Richardson said, and has found lots to praise about the enterprise-quality Java EE 5 application server. Specifics of GlassFish that Richardson mentioned the university has found favor with are its failover and clustering capabilities. Additionally, he commented, "We use NetBeans as our development environment, we use EJBs, we use JSF tools -- we like the palette that NetBeans has and we can develop with, and it deploys seamlessly with GlassFish, so it kind of works out for us all the way around."

The institution has imported over 60 applications onto GlassFish from Weblogic.

Richardson admits that the porting process was a bit difficult at first, but using the resources available to him, such as technicians and contacts made at JavaOne, helped his group through the process. "Now it's working great," he said. "(GlassFish) is great. A good thing."

In June 2005, Sun launched Project GlassFish, with the goal of creating an open-source Java EE 5 application server through a developer community working on a code repository at java.net. This is the same code base used in the Java EE 5 reference implementation and in the Java EE SDK. The same code base is used in Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server version 2 and earlier versions of it are used in Sun Java System Application Server 8.x and the Sun Java Enterprise System; some portions of it are used in the Sun Java System Web Server.

Why is it appealing to higher institutions and other education customers:

Free

The last releases of Sun Java System Application Server 8.x are free for development and deployment.

Open Source

The large majority of the code base uses CDDL, an OSI-approved source license that is also used by the OpenSolaris project. Some portions use the Apache license. GPLv2 with ClassPath Exception was added too, so GlassFish is dual-licensed.

Community Built

The initial contribution to Project GlassFish was from Sun, which donated the code base for its Application Server. Other contributors include Oracle, with the Java Persistence contribution, as well as smaller individual contributors.

Java EE 5 Compatible

The Application Server built by the GlassFish community is following the latest version of the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) specification and also implements other relevant standards.

Enterprise Grade

Since the code base in the GlassFish community is used in Sun's enterprise offerings, the effort has enterprise-grade attributes, including documentation, administration and monitoring, support, etc. These attributes are progressively being upgraded from earlier versions of the Application Server.

System Requirements

There are builds currently available for Mac OS X, Linux, SunOS, SunOS_X86 and Windows.

More Information

Video: University of Utah - Ported 60 applications from Weblogic to GlassFish

Downloads

Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server 2.1 Quick Start Guide

Java EE at a Glance

GlassFish Community

NetBeans

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