Real world comparisons of Glassfish and JBoss 5?

Question

Does anyone have experiences with both in the real world? How do they compare in terms of performance (memory usage, speed, etc)? Stability?

Does JBoss Seam work well

Answer 1

(disclaimer: I work at Sun and I am in the GF team)

I agree that Seam works fine on GlassFish; see https://blogs.oracle.com/theaquarium/tags/seam

GFv3 is quite different than JBoss 5; in particular:

• GFv3 is based on OSGi while JBoss 5's kernel is based on JMX.
• GFv3 supports JavaEE 6; JBoss 5 supports Java EE 5.

GFv3 is designed to be very modular; services start on demand, there is an update center repository, etc. GFv3 is significantly smaller than JBoss 5 and will start much faster. JBoss 5.1 GA is listed as 130MB; GFv3Preview is 50MB. GFv3 starts in a couple of seconds; JBoss in tens (you should try the startup for your own platform).

There are other differences, some inherited from GlassFish v2 like the graphical admin console, or the admin CLI.

A more direct comparison for JBoss 5 would be the GlassFish v2 releases, which are based on Java EE 5. The latest release in that family is GFv2.1, with a GFv2.1.1 release scheduled in October (see https://blogs.oracle.com/theaquarium/entry/schedule_for_glassfish_v2_1).

Sun also provides patch releases of GlassFish (akin to RedHat's support for JBoss); see https://blogs.oracle.com/glassfishforbusiness and sun.com/glassfish.