Why use Glassfish instead of Apache? What's it strengths and weaknesses?

Question

Sorry for my ignorance here, but when I hear the word webserver, I immediately imagine Apache, although I know people use Microsoft\'s IIS too. However since I\'ve been hanging

Answer 1

Glassfish will soon release the modular kernel.

This means that the containers you need start up and shutdown as you need them. I.e no EAR deployed, EJB container won;t start up. This seems to have made it very good for development as it can start and stop very quickly. This takes it a lot closer to development environments like Rails (where redeployment is a massive part of your development)

Answer 2

The need for a seperate Web server is mostly needed in a production environment. You would normally find a Application server to be suffice most of your development needs. A web server is capable of holding larger number of active sessions and connections, thus providing the necessary balance without performance costs.

Stick to a simple web server if you are only working with servlets/jsps. It is also to be noted that in a netbeans environment, glassfish has better support than other App servers. In the context of eclipse though, WSAD and JBoss seem to the preferred options.

Answer 3

GlassFish is an Application Server which can also be used as a Web Server (Http Server).

A web Server means: Handling HTTP requests (usually from browsers).

A Servlet Container (e.g. Tomcat) means: It can handle servlets & JSP.

An Application Server (e.g. GlassFish) means: It can manage Java EE applications (usually both servlet/JSP and EJBs).

You should use GlassFish for Java EE enterprise applications.

Answer 4

I have used GlassFish server for developing Web Services. It provides a very interactive Admin Console where admin can test the Web Services. I really find it helpful while developing Web Services