Oracle’s announcement of discontinuing commercial support for GlassFish has left open source developers at a crossroad where they need to make a choice.

They can continue using GlassFish Open Source Edition with no commercial support from Oracle. If customers do want production support then they need to rely upon third-party support, for example LodgOn or C2B2 Consulting.

Other option is to chose another open source alternative such as JBoss EAP (commercially supported by Red Hat) or TomEE (commercially supported by Tomitribe).

Earlier Hildeberto Mendonça (@htmfilho) and Efraim Gentil (@efraimgentil) from CEJUG published a great article explaining how to migrate your applications from GlassFish to WildFly. This article explained in detail on how to migrate JDBC resources, JMS resources, and Security Realm.

And now Rebel Labs (@RebelLabs) has published a stellar report – Abandon fish! Migrating from GlassFish to JBoss or TomEE. This 31-page report is very rational and balanced and provide details on migrating applications from GlassFish to JBoss EAP, WildFly, or TomEE.

The report says that there are other open source alternatives as well such as Jetty, Resin, Geronimo, JOnAS, and more. But JBoss/WildFly and TomEE were chosen because of the following reasons:

• The vibrant developer community around these tools, namely JBoss and Tomcat
• The amount of documentation available on the web
• The sponsorship and support by market leaders

WebLogic and WebSphere are not considered as suitable alternatives when migrating from GlassFish because the report says “the most logical decision when migrating from GlassFish is opting for an equivalent open source alternative”.

The report provides a more holistic view with application migration, IDEs, CI servers, testing using Arquillian, and other aspects.

Here are couple of more quotes from the report:

WildFly and JBoss EAP have a well-established history of providing commercial support on top of excellent products

Red Hat is the poster-child in enterprise open source solutions

What’s the need for closed source and heavyweight application servers in the world of JBoss and TomEE ?

Download:

• JBoss EAP (commercial supported by Red Hat for Java EE 6)
• WildFly (community build for Java EE 7)
• TomEE (commercially supported by Tomitribe for Java EE 6)

Additionally, you can also look at Windup (scan and report on your Java EE applications and report potential “trouble spots” for migration), WindRide (migrate applications from older version of JBoss to newer versions),  and Tubame (Eclipse plugins that help in migration).