GlassFish, and its associated Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) code, has been fully migrated to Eclipse Foundation stewardship. The new release, Eclipse GlassFish 5.1.0, is now fully Java EE 8 certified, which represents a key step to ensuring backward compatibility of Jakarta EE.

GlassFish is the reference implementation of Java EE, in other words, the standard from which all other implementations and corresponding customizations are derived. GlassFish was initially created by Sun Microsystems for the Java EE platform and is now sponsored by Oracle, who have a supported version called Oracle GlassFish Server.

GlassFish supports Enterprise JavaBeans, JPA, JavaServer Faces, JMS, RMI, JavaServer Pages, and Servlets, meaning that developers can use it to create enterprise applications that are portable and scalable, and that integrate with legacy technologies.

The idea of transferring Java EE sources to the Eclipse Foundation was announced at the 2017 Oracle JavaOne conference

The new release, GlassFish 5.1, has been fully tested under both the open source TCK and proprietary Oracle Java EE 8 TCK. The Eclipse Foundation says that the completion of the new version was a key accomplishment in allowing work to begin on the release of Jakarta EE 8.  The Eclipse Foundation aims to have Eclipse GlassFish 5.2 be a Jakarta EE 8 compatible implementation, and the Foundation has gained the support of all of the major vendors who have Java EE 8 compatible versions of their commercial products. The companies have all committed to ensuring their products are Jakarta EE 8 compatible as well.

The migration has been described as "an enormous engineering and legal challenge". Java EE TCKs are open-sourced and hosted at the Eclipse Foundation. In addition, the Eclipse GlassFish code base was re-licensed from CDDL+GPL and Classpath to Eclipse Public License  2.0 plus GPL with the Classpath Exception.

The developers say this has been a massive amount of work. The Java EE source-code contains over 5.5 million lines of code and over 2.2 million lines of comments in more than 61,000 files. For comparison, it’s around the same as the server side of World of Warcraft and the Linux Kernel 2.6.0. The CTS/TCK contains over 4.6 million lines of code and over 1.1 million lines of comments in more than 34,000 files. It’s comparable with the codebase of Windows NT 3.1 and Photoshop CS6.

More Information

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