I’m a longtime Jetty user and a huge fan (it’s always been my appserver of choice and the stuff coming in Jetty 6.0 looks just amazing), but for my own sites (including this one), I’ve made the switch to Glassfish. I’ve heard so much good stuff about it lately it was time to take it for a proper workout.
The install was painless, and I had my apps redeployed on the appropriate virtual servers inside 30 minutes - and without a single restart. That’s pretty sensational stuff - mainly due to an outstanding web admin UI and a very comprehensive set of documentation.
One of the real killer features that people rave about with Glassfish is the hot deploy stuff. I’m going to be giving it a bit of a workout in that department with an upcoming Grails app, and I’m keen to keep my outages to a bare minimum. For all of the setup, I could do it all from the web UI, and I was so impressed that I didn’t need to bounce the server - adding domains, deploying and redeploying apps, adding new port listeners, all good.
I’m really keen to see how it holds up as a main site. I always ran Jetty using Supervise to handle the restarts when it inevidably fell over. With Glassfish, I have no such safety net, but it has quite a reputation for being rock solid, so we’ll see how I fare.
But I’m sure loving every second of that sweet web-based administration…