New Glassfish Portfolio
February 09, 2009
I spoke with Mark Herring and Paul Hinz of Sun last week, regarding today's announcement of the new Glassfish Portfolio suite being made available. This new suite includes Glassfish Enterprise Server, the Glassfish web stack, and the rest of the LAMP stack, which includes Apache Tomcat and Sun MySQL.
Resolving Complexity
Overall, the problem that Sun is addressing with Glassfish Portfolio is complexity. This is an issue that has haunted Java EE since its introduction. The attempt here is resolve all of that complexity by not just giving you simpler tools to use, but by packaging them together to ensure they work seamlessly.
Glassfish Web Space Server - Collaboration
Sun has done this with Glassfish Portfolio, and has introduced some new integration features, such as the inclusion of the OSS LifeRay Portal project (http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/home). Sun is calling this portion of Glassfish the Web Space Server, which is basically a lightweight portal structure, including a productized version of LifeRay with additional pieces. Features include collaboration and sharing, similar to Microsoft Sharepoint, but it's really more of a superset. For instance, with WebSpace Server, you can use it to open and build SharePoint projects; there's front and back end integration with SharePoint. However, it's released 100% open source, with widgets built in Ruby and PHP, as well as Java. This makes it a multi-OS, multi-language, open source portal server. This differentiates it from others on the market.
Production Deployments
With Glassfish Portfolio, Sun has productized OpenESB for production deployments. It's fully tested, integrated, and supported. Glassfish is being made available to run on Linux, OpenSolaris, and Windows, with a very simple pricing structure:
-Per server price: $999 per server (regardless of cores or sockets) to start, based on the pieces deployed and the support package you choose.
-Unlimited price: fixed price of $120K to start. With this, you can deploy on as many physical and virtual servers you need.
Paying customers get patch auto updates, where all patches are qualified and tested, and integrated to work together seamlessly. TMobile served as a Glassfish Portfolio Early Access customer. They picked up the high-availability characteristics, on top of the convenience of open source.
