These days, we're accustomed to hearing bad news on the economic front. However, GlassFish has just recorded a record-setting September in terms of downloads, registrations, and admin pings. The GlassFish downloads graph is indicative of a "breakout" for GlassFish within the application server market sphere.
In ancient (i.e., when I used to trade) stock chart watcher's lingo, a "breakout" was when a relatively stable level is suddenly interrupted by a lurch in a particular direction. Such sudden lurches were considered harbingers of major readjustments in the stock's pricing. Maybe stock charts are still interpreted that way by some technical analysts. Anyway, the interpretation of the lastest GlassFish graph would be that developers who need an application server are suddenly moving toward GlassFish. Perhaps the Version 3.0 enhancements, stability, and the more complete, integrated platform are attracting attention?
In his brief Aquarium post, peligri notes that the Google Trends graph for four leading app servers (GlassFish, JBoss, WebLogic, WebSphere) shows GlassFish holding steady in September, while the others decline. One thing I've noticed about Google Trends is that if a line is flat, it actually means that overall interest in that "topic" is increasing. Because the Google Trends search volume index for a topic is (I'm pretty sure) a measure of the proportion of all searches for that topic with respect to total Google searches. Since the number of topics and total search volume are ever expanding, if an individual topic or keyword has a flat Google Trends graph, that would mean that interest in that topic is changing at the same percentage rate as the total number of Google searches. Since total searches are increasing, a flat Google Trends line means the actual number of searches for that topic is increasing. Hence, I'd suggest that there is no inconsistency between the flat Google Trends line for GlassFish and the recent upward trend in the graphs for actual downloads.
peligri also wrote a longer post on his blogs.sun.com blog. There, he cites the following reasons for the upturn:
The good numbers are partly due to the end of the summer, partly to people getting over the Sun+Oracle noise, partly to GFv3/JavaEE 6 getting closer, and partly to improved visibility of our downloads links in different Java.Sun.Com sites.
I'll grant that -- but to me, that cannot fully explain the almost doubling of GlassFish SDK downloads (to 389,603) from a baseline extending all the way back to July 2005 where the monthly SDK downloads were typically in the 150,000 to 200,000 range. If I'm reading the chart correctly, September's GlassFish SDK downloads were about 50% higher than August's.
Furthermore, the chart shows a previous peak for SDK downloads in March of this year. And prior to that, there was a significant peak last September. Each successive SDK download peak is significantly higher than the last one. To me, that suggests that GlassFish is taking off.
At JavaOne, I spent a lot of the little free time that was available to me wandering around the GlassFish-centric booths. It was impressive to see all the component projects in action, demonstrated and explained by the developers. The software is impressive, the community is vibrant, the sub-projects are well organized and are producing a very well-rounded suite of extensions/add-ons to an increasingly rock-solid, stable, GlassFish base platform.
I've pushed out the Sept 2009 Adoption Stats for GlassFish and it shows a record month on downloads, registrations and admin pings. Of all the numbers, I like best the number of unique registered users: 387,384! ...
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In the Forums, tdanecito has a Web Start preformance question...: "Hi All, I noticed that for every jax-ws (metro) call to connect back to my server where Web Start app was downloaded from it does a checkConnect from the web start security package. Why would it do that and is there a way to turn it off after..."
leswestberg has a Problem Setting GlassFish Enterprise 2.1 to run in FIPS mode: "The issue we are seeing is that if you install GlassFish Enterprise 2.1 with HADB on Windows XP professional with Service Pack 3 or Windows Vista, it is installed using the NSS libraries. GlassFish starts up fine. However the problem arises with the..."http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/entry/the_summer_is_over_record
And dabd gets an error WebappClassLoader not yet started or already stopped: "Hello, I get the following error: "java.lang.Error: WebappClassLoader WebappClassLoader delegate: true repositories: not yet started or already stopped" when invoking a JAX-RS Web Service on my deployment glassfish..."
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