Glassfish?

Douglas, a SUN employee, from the comments asks: "Marc, what do you think about Glassfish?". And I am thinking to myself: not much.

You know I am a bit out of the flow these days, in fact I am looking forward to traveling to EU this week to catch up with a lot of my old JBoss friends on the development side. They have their great mass going on and it is also time for "fetes des vendanges" which is a world class opportunity to get drunk with some of my favorite peoples.

The bad news: with all due respect, I do not think it matters much to JBoss or even the market frankly, what Glassfish does. For the foreseable future (5years) no market share movement will unseat JBoss from leadership. Things just don't move that fast in middleware as you know.

The good news: within the realm of what is possible however, it looks like you guys haven't completely embarassed yourselves yet again with an application server offering. I will believe that grass-root activism within JAVA is probably responsible for what seems to be a well executed strategy. Pat yourself on the back and you get an A for perseverance.

Look at this way: you can have at it all you want with Geronimo and IBM. I think you get to claim a clear #2 position, do you? Good for you. Watch out for IBM though, you know they are big and all. The fact that JAVA employees have outsmarted IBM in building a semi-credible OSS alternative speaks for itself. This is something you should collectively take pride in.

marcf