Hi Reza
does anyone actually derive any value in investing in GlassFish
quality for it's own sake?
Yes :) For example, currently my company ManageCat (recently a new member of Jakarta EE), started to invest in Eclipse Glassfish and the overall Jakarta EE ecosystem. I have already contributed to Admin Console codebase to be usable in production and some other parts (such as Jakarta EE TCK, Mojarra etc.). We are also researching to add new features on top of the Glassfish codebase to be usable in production systems effectively and contribute back these features to the Eclipse Glassfish community.
As such, I don't think anyone would try
to put GlassFish into production any more.
I thought so before I got into it, and realized that it can be fully used in production systems. The problem with not using the Glassfish in production systems is not related with Glassfish quality but mostly around who will support it. Glassfish includes everything to be used in production systems (Clustering, security, administration, messaging, and more .). From my experience, it is much more feature complete than some other open source application servers (not certified) currently used in production systems.
The only place I see value is a basic mechanism for finishing the
Jakarta EE 9 release requirements and ensuring the TCK is usable
by other, more production ready implementations (and that is where
I was thinking the crowd sourcing focus would be).
As I said above, Eclipse Glassfish can be perfectly used in production systems but the reason for not using it is not related with its quality but lack of vendor support.
Slightly beyond
that, GlassFish could perhaps serve as the mechanism for some
early Jakarta EE 9 evaluation.
We really don't want Glassfish to look like this. It has a super and healthy community. We will do our best to use Eclipse Glassfish in production systems.
Just wanted to share my own view.
Regards.
Gurkan