Java Enterprise Edition is Dead

I am reading an opinion piece on Java EE. It states that that there were two winners for application servers. There was WebLogic which was best. And there was JBoss that was free. However web services and REST seemed to take away their steam.

Do you actually need an app server? Maybe you can just get by with plain old JDBC. Here is the killer stat which might prove Java EE is a dead end. Nobody implements Java EE 6. There is only open source GlassFish. Ouch.

Java is not dead. But Java Enterprise Edition may very well be. I am glad I did not spend too much time with Java EE.

GlassFish Portfolio

When I started learning Java, I downloaded the JDK from Sun like I assume everyone else did. There was one bundle that came with GlassFish, which is an application server from Sun Microsystems. I opted not to get it.

Sun apparently is releasing more stuff for GlassFish with their GlassFish Portfolio. This is a four piece set of products that are related to GlassFish. Now these products are not for free. I think this is one place where Sun plans to actually make some money.

The GlassFish Portfolio consists of the GlassFish web stack, Enterprise Service Bus, Web Space Server, and Management Toolkit. Before downloading the JDK and seeing the GlassFish option, I had never even heard of GlassFish. I suppose that means that not many people use it. Websphere and Weblogic seem to own the application server market. Perhaps some add-ons like the GlassFish Portfolio may help Sun try to even the gap. Alas they may already be too far behind in the race.