Embedded GlassFish

Introduction

This project develops APIs and tools around "Embedded GlassFish". Embedded GlassFish is a delivery vehicle of GlassFish (version 3 and above) so that applications and tools can use GlassFish just as a library, inside their JVM, instead of having GlassFish as the overload of the entire JVM process. (And no, Embedded GlassFish is not meant to be run on JavaME.)

Why does it matter?

This opens up a whole new range of possibilities around tools and test frameworks. Imagine running "mvn embedded-glassfish:run" on your ear/war/rar/... Maven project and start a whole GlassFish in place in a few seconds, without a prior installation anywhere in your system.

Or imagine unit testing your web service applications, where the test client and the server executes on a single system, invoked from a single Ant target. It drastically simplifies the debugging by eliminating the need for working with two JVMs.

Its size and speed also makes it a great lightweight web server.

Unlike several existing servlet containers that offer similar functionalities, GlassFish 3 will come in any flavor ranging from barebone servlet container to cluster-enabled Java EE conformant container with all the scripting language support. So when you go with the embeddedGlassFish 3, you can smoothly migrate to higher-level GlassFish 3 distributions.

Getting Started :

Development of GlassFish Embedded has moved to the core GlassFish project as it's really just another way to start the server (and it is aligned with the GlassFish 3 release). Look at the following links for documentation and blog entries to get started :

Embedded API javadocs
Embedded Maven Plugin Documentation
Embedded GlassFish 3.2 One Pager

Blogs:

Issues are filed in the GlassFish Issue Tracker under 'embedded' component. The embedded users mailing alias is : users@embedded-glassfish.java.net The main GlassFish users mailing list is : users@glassfish.java.net.