Upcoming GlassFish 7.1 release overview

[OndroMih]

Hi all, since a new GlassFish 7.1 release is coming soon, I'd like to visually summarize what's coming.

A lot of the improvements and changes coming in GlassFish 7.1 are based on #25225 post by @dmatej, a GlassFish project lead. Although GlassFish 7.1 was initially planned around half of the year 2025, it took a longer to tune everything together. We at OmniFish put a lot of effort into making sure that everything works as it should and passes all the tests. The changes in Maven Central deployments and adjustments needed to run the Jakarta EE TCK against GlassFish 7.1 delayed this release. Meanwhile, we also stopped releasing new versions of the 7.0.x branch to fully focus on GlassFish 7.1 and GlassFish 8.

OmniFish has big plans with GlassFish for the future, stay tuned for more news and future GlassFish releases!

[arjantijms]

The icons look quite nice really

[OndroMih]

We released a milestone version of GlassFish 7.1.0M1 to Maven Central. Info about it here: #25709

Please try it out and let us know if something looks odd.

[OndroMih]

Related to setting the jta datasource in persistence.xml, it's not yet supported by a reference to a system property but it's possible using the old-school resource reference, which you can map to a specific datasource using an alternative deployment descriptor during deployment, see https://github.com/eclipse-ee4j/glassfish/pull/24964/files#diff-228af36194b3b33c1aeb4c6deb04f0fd1eebb6cd430e518b61cf2f49225c8415.

In short, you would need to do the following:

• specify a resource reference in web.xml with some name, e.g. myDS
• use the resource reference name (e.g. myDS) as the name of the jta datasource in persistence.xml
• create a glassfish-web.xml with mapping of the resource to a specific datasource JNDI name
• deploy the app with the external glassfish-web.xml descriptor, with the --runtimealtdd argument to the deploy command. This is not supported when deploying using Admin Console, only on command line

This is not so convenient as setting the datasource using a system property, a change in configuration requires redeployment, but could work for you in some scenarios, until GlassFish supports a better solution.

[ctabin]

Thanks @OndroMih !
Regarding the property lookup in persistence.xml that is not really a place where we need. However, we need that lookup in the root context in the annotation: @WebServlet(urlPatterns="/${var.context_root}/path"). This is because we only build one single (signed) deliverable (ear) that will be installed on-premise and the context-root might be customized.
I wasn't able to test this part since this doesn't work in glassfish-embedded 7.1.0-M1.

[OndroMih]

I understand, @ctabin. This is exactly what we have in progress. We'll see whether we can finish it in time for the final 7.1.0 version.

[ctabin]

Hi @OndroMih, I just tested version 8.0.0-M14 and was able to deploy our application with JDK21 and JDK25 (I had to remove the dynamic lookup BTW) 🎉 Thanks for the amazing work !

[OndroMih]

Great to hear that, @ctabin ! 💪
We'd be glad if you posted about it on socials or a blog 😉

[OndroMih]

Another important enhancement in GlassFish 7.1 is that monitoring statistics are going to be supported in runnable Embedded GlassFish and exposed initially via JMX: #25752

Also a lot of monitoring statistics, especially for thread pools, are going to be fixed so that they are reliable in all scenarios. Several PRs for version 7.1 address that, not only the one in the link above.

[kbachl]

how about JDK 25 official support?

[OndroMih]

JDK 25 is going to be supported. I forgot to add it to the overview.

Support for the latest Java version in the latest GlassFish version is usually implicit, we always test against the upcoming Java versions and fix issues as they arise.

[OndroMih]

Actually, I realized that the chart above mentions support for Java 17-25, which includes Java 25 🙂

[dmatej]

There are some limitations if I remember well from top of my head. You should not enable the SecurityManager as it is not supported on Java 25 any more. Because of that we also could not run all tests of the TCK for Jakarta EE 10, so we cannot be sure if there is not something hidden in a suite case. However GlassFish 8.0 will be tested on Java 25 completely.

[OndroMih]

GlassFish 7.1 has been released today: https://github.com/eclipse-ee4j/glassfish/releases/tag/7.1.0

Although we planned to release it sooner, we faced a lot of infrastructure challenges out of our control. We also discovered a few sources of instability at a later stage of testing, which were introduced by changes since the previous release. We treat high quality and production stability as the top priority, so we put effort into fixing all these issues before we released a new version.

Here's more info from the GlassFish Project Lead, David Matejcek: https://www.eclipse.org/lists/glassfish-dev/msg01709.html

The next thing is GlassFish 8.0, with Jakarta EE 11, including Jakarta Data with support for both SQL (JPA) and NoSQL repositories.