We (Payara) are at JavaOne 2014 and one of the key reasons for me to attend was to catch up on the future of GlassFish. So on Sunday I went along to the GlassFish community update at the Moscone Center to consult with the Oracle on the future of GlassFish.The reason I go to JavaOne is to hear the definitive view on GlassFish and JavaEE futures from the people that make the decisions. There's no other conference you can say that about.

On the stand there were 4 Oracle guys who make the decisions on GlassFish.
John Clingan - Product Manager for JavaEE and GlassFish; Mike Lehman - Product Manager for Cloud Application Framework; Cameron Purdy - VP Development; Reza Rahman - Evangelist for JavaEE and GlassFish.

What I saw was that there is a roadmap for GlassFish out until JavaOne 2016 as JavaEE8 develops with GlassFish 5 being the reference implementation for JavaEE 8. GlassFish 5 will aim to be released as the final draft for JavaEE 8 hit the JCP.

Cameron spoke about GlassFish being a key Research and Development platform with much of the technology created in GlassFish to support the JavaEE specifications finding its way into WebLogic with GlassFish having a key role in the evolution of JavaEE far into the future. Many of the key JavaEE specification developers are working on GlassFish as part of their JSR work and that is a huge investment.

John reiterated that Quality, stability and security are still important. The team continue to work to ensure that GlassFish passes all the JSR Compatibility Test Suites and any issues will be fixed. In fact the key priorities for the recent 4.1 release were Java 8 support, stability and quality. Also much of the work invested into GlassFish for JavaEE 8 support will be shareable with WebLogic.

Mike spoke about how collaboration and community is core to GlassFish and JavaEE development. Much of the learning and innovation brought into GlassFish as part of JavaEE 8 is key to Oracle bringing JavaEE 8 compliance to WebLogic faster with shared componentry envisaged between the 2 application servers e.g. Eclispelink, Tyrus and Jersey all being shared components.

On the topic of community participation in GlassFish and JavaEE Cameron emphasised the success of the adopt a JSR programme and encouraged everybody to get involved in the JavaEE 8 JSRs which will start to kick off now. Mike reiterated that the results of the JavaEE survey fed directly into the priority list of JavaEE 8 so community involvement is key to JavaEE 8. John reiterated that GlassFish development is very much open for contributions, just sign the Oracle Contributor Agreement and away you go, with no barriers. Also FishCAT has been a core quality project and show stopper bugs were identified and fixed in GlassFish 4.1 via the community FishCAT programme.

All in all, in my opinion, the outlook from these top Oracle executives was very positive and the future of GlassFish looks to be a platform for rapid innovation in the latest JavaEE 8 goodies combined with providing developers with a quality open source platform for JavaEE.

I came away not only reassured that GlassFish has a future but also that it may have an exciting future.