For years, developers and organizations have held certain beliefs about GlassFish, often based on their experiences with older versions. If you still think of GlassFish as a slow, unsupported, and purely for-development application server, it’s time to take a fresh look. At OmniFish, we’ve been working hard to change that perception since 2022. The Eclipse GlassFish of today, particularly from version 7.0 onwards, is a completely different platform, and we’re proud to show you what we’ve helped to build with the rest of the Eclipse GlassFish contributors.
This article explores the key differences between the modern Eclipse GlassFish and its predecessor, Oracle GlassFish and older Eclipse GlassFish versions. We’ll show you how GlassFish has evolved into a robust, enterprise-grade platform with commercial support from our team at OmniFish, with frequent updates, and a strong commitment to modern Java standards and modern lightweight deployments. In short, this is no longer your father’s GlassFish.
The Myth of the Unsupported, Non-Production Server
One of the most persistent myths about GlassFish is that it’s not suitable for production environments and lacks commercial support. This might have been a valid concern in the past, but it is no longer true. Since 2022 and GlassFish 7.0, the landscape has changed dramatically. Eclipse GlassFish is now a production-ready, enterprise-grade platform with active commercial support with enterprise guaranteesfrom OmniFish.
We founded OmniFish because we believe in GlassFish’s potential as a modern, enterprise-ready application server. As long-time GlassFish experts, we’re committed to providing comprehensive long-term support for Eclipse GlassFish, ensuring that businesses can rely on it for their mission-critical applications. Here’s what we offer:
24×7 Support: With strict service level agreements (SLAs) for critical deployments.
Supported Builds: Access to secure and thoroughly tested builds of GlassFish.
Bug Fixes and Security Patches: Timely resolution of defects and vulnerabilities.
Hot-fixes and Patches: Quick fixes for urgent issues.
Expert Consultancy: Guidance on architecture, performance tuning, and migrations.
Not sure which support level fits your needs? Schedule a free consultancy call with our experts to discuss your specific environment.
Beyond providing support, we actively steer the GlassFish project within the Eclipse Foundation, regularly adding new features and improvements that keep GlassFish at the forefront of modern Java application platforms. Our commitment to continuous innovation means that GlassFish is not just maintained—it’s actively evolving to meet the needs of modern enterprises.
This level of support and active development means that the claim that GlassFish is not production-ready is outdated. Organizations can now confidently deploy GlassFish in production, knowing that they have a team of experts backing them up and continuously improving the platform.
Axasoft relies on OmniFish to provide support for GlassFish, which runs our critical applications. They’ve handled a lot of our issues quickly and well, and we’re happy to have them as a partner.
Miroslav Žitňanský, Director of POS Division at AXASOFT, a.s.
Key Differences: Eclipse GlassFish vs. Oracle GlassFish
To help you understand the evolution of GlassFish, let’s briefly summarize the history of GlassFish and then compare the modern Eclipse GlassFish with the older Oracle GlassFish across several key areas.
There were multiple periods in the history of GlassFish:
Until 2012: Commercially supported Oracle GlassFish
Last release was GlassFish 3.1.2.2, July 2012
2012-2022: Opensource releases of GlassFish with no commercial support
First release of Payara, the most successful GlassFish fork: Payara 4.1.144, October 2014
Last release from Oracle: GlassFish 5.0, September 2017
First release from Eclipse Foundation: Eclipse GlassFish 5.1, January 2019
Since 2022 until now: Actively maintained GlassFish, commercially supported by OmniFish
First production-ready release: Eclipse GlassFish 7.0, December 2022
Latest major release: Eclipse GlassFish 8.0, February 2026
And here’s how the Eclipse GlassFish since 2022 (starting with GlassFish 7.0) compares to Oracle GlassFish before 2018 (until GlassFish 5.0):
Feature
Oracle GlassFish (Pre-2018)
Eclipse GlassFish (Post-2022)
Support
Limited to no active commercial support
Active long-term support from OmniFish
Release Cadence
Infrequent, stagnant
Frequent, monthly releases with new features and fixes
As you can see, Eclipse GlassFish has made significant strides in every important aspect of a modern application server. It is no longer the abandoned GlassFish of the past but a forward-looking platform designed for today’s enterprise needs.
What’s New in Eclipse GlassFish 7.0 and Beyond
Our GlassFish team in OmniFish has been focused on modernizing Eclipse GlassFish, and the numerous improvements and new features we’ve introduced in recent versions prove our commitment. Let’s look at some of the highlights that make Eclipse GlassFish a top choice for enterprise Java development.
Jakarta EE 11 and MicroProfile Support
We’re proud to say that Eclipse GlassFish is at the forefront of Java standards. Under OmniFish’s lead, it was the first to pass the Jakarta EE 11 Web Profile and Jakarta EE 11 Platform TCKs, demonstrating our commitment to the latest specifications. This means you can use the newest features of Jakarta EE with confidence. In addition, GlassFish now supports several popular MicroProfile APIs such as Health, Config, REST Client, and JWT. This makes it an excellent choice for building resilient and configurable microservices.
A New Era for Embedded GlassFish
We’ve transformed Embedded GlassFish from a developer-focused tool into a production-ready, lightweight runtime. It’s now a viable option for running microservices from the command line or in cloud containers. With the inclusion of MicroProfile APIs and JMX monitoring, Embedded GlassFish offers the same power and observability as the full server in a smaller footprint.
Performance and Security at the Core
The recent GlassFish releases have focused heavily on performance and security. You can expect faster startup times, improved JDBC pool throughput, and better resource management. GlassFish also supports the latest Java versions, up to Java 25, allowing you to take advantage of the newest language features and JVM optimizations.
On the security front, we’ve moved GlassFish to the PKCS12 keystore format by default and addressed critical vulnerabilities, ensuring that your applications are secure and compliant with industry standards.
Read about improvements in the recent GlassFish releases in more detail here.
Get Started with the New GlassFish
We invite you to experience the new Eclipse GlassFish for yourself. Whether you’re a long-time Java developer or just starting, you’ll find that GlassFish is a powerful and easy-to-use platform for building modern, enterprise-grade applications.
What legacy GlassFish issue has kept you from upgrading? Let us know in the comments below, or reach out to us on social media—we’d love to help you find a solution.
5 thoughts on “Eclipse GlassFish: This Isn’t Your Father’s GlassFish”
Jan Nilsson
Hi
I have worked with Glassfish even before it was named Glassfish, Java One Application Server 7, so now I am curious how many people are actually working with Glassfish to improve it ?
There’s public information available in Github and Eclipse Project pages. To summarize, 3 core OmniFish engineers do about 3/4 of the work on GlassFish, and then there are 2 very active community contributors on the GlassFish main repository and 1 or 2 on the Grizzly repository, which is now officially part of the umbrella Glassfish project too. 1 more OmniFish engineer works on GlassFish from time to time. A few other committers from Fujitsu help with reviewing code changes and sometimes contribute fixes and small improvements. Then there are others, who don’t contribute regularly but their contributions are worthwile.
Some more statistics are on the GlassFish project page, which aggregates activity throughout all the 29 GlassFish repositories in Github for the last 3 months, in nice charts: https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/ee4j.glassfish/who
I hope that gives you some overview of who are the people and companies currently behind GlassFish.
It seems like you’re trying to build GlassFish from sources or download a very old version of GlassFish 5. Is it the case? GlassFish 8 depends on Grizzly 5.0.0, not on 5.0.0-SNAPSHOT.
Can you please clarify what you did when you got this error?
I think you mean the issue that using some Grizzly 5 modules in a project lead to an error from Maven. This is not an issue with GlassFish itself but with the specific GlassFish Grizzly module if it’s used separately outside of GlassFish. It’s a known issue: https://github.com/eclipse-ee4j/glassfish-grizzly/issues/2278
We’ll see whether we can fix it soon. As a workaround, you can build the snapshot modules from sources and push them into your local Maven repository. After that, your build should pass.
Hi
I have worked with Glassfish even before it was named Glassfish, Java One Application Server 7, so now I am curious how many people are actually working with Glassfish to improve it ?
Hi Jan,
There’s public information available in Github and Eclipse Project pages. To summarize, 3 core OmniFish engineers do about 3/4 of the work on GlassFish, and then there are 2 very active community contributors on the GlassFish main repository and 1 or 2 on the Grizzly repository, which is now officially part of the umbrella Glassfish project too. 1 more OmniFish engineer works on GlassFish from time to time. A few other committers from Fujitsu help with reviewing code changes and sometimes contribute fixes and small improvements. Then there are others, who don’t contribute regularly but their contributions are worthwile.
You can have a look at the statistics for the main GlassFish GitHub repository for the last year: https://github.com/eclipse-ee4j/glassfish/graphs/contributors?from=11%2F18%2F2024&to=3%2F1%2F2026
Or for the GlassFish Grizzly repository – there are a few more people who don’t contribute to GlassFish main repo: https://github.com/eclipse-ee4j/glassfish-grizzly/graphs/contributors?from=3%2F1%2F2025
Some more statistics are on the GlassFish project page, which aggregates activity throughout all the 29 GlassFish repositories in Github for the last 3 months, in nice charts: https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/ee4j.glassfish/who
I hope that gives you some overview of who are the people and companies currently behind GlassFish.
All the best,
Ondro
OmniFish director
Glassfish 5 is broken in maven central. I get the following error:
“Could not find org.glassfish.grizzly:grizzly-bom:5.0.0-SNAPSHOT”
Hi,
It seems like you’re trying to build GlassFish from sources or download a very old version of GlassFish 5. Is it the case? GlassFish 8 depends on Grizzly 5.0.0, not on 5.0.0-SNAPSHOT.
Can you please clarify what you did when you got this error?
I think you mean the issue that using some Grizzly 5 modules in a project lead to an error from Maven. This is not an issue with GlassFish itself but with the specific GlassFish Grizzly module if it’s used separately outside of GlassFish. It’s a known issue: https://github.com/eclipse-ee4j/glassfish-grizzly/issues/2278
We’ll see whether we can fix it soon. As a workaround, you can build the snapshot modules from sources and push them into your local Maven repository. After that, your build should pass.