In the Java world it is rather common to use something called application servers. These are meta-applications that provide your applications an environment with things like database abstractions and the like, as well as admin interfaces.
It solves some of the same problems you might reach for Kubernetes or OpenShift for, your application gets access to external resources in structured ways and you get to look at dashboards.
GlassFish is an example of such an application server. WildFly is more common, and is the artist formerly known as JBoss. If you have some knowledge in the enterprise Java ecosystem you can quickly and easily (or maybe not, it depends) deploy your creations into these.
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However, at a brief glance back at the article, The second sentence in the first paragraph says it's an "application server". Further below the illustration image, there's a text in bold that says "Eclipse GlassFish is now a production-ready, enterprise-grade platform".
So I'm really curious, whether the article didn't make it clear, or there was a lack of interest on your side.
probably this article isn't for you if "glassfish" isn't a familiar term.
if curious (or fomo) it would have taken you about 15 secs to find out what glassfish is, which is still probably 15 less than what you wasted on this mini rant. from there it's up to you to go down the rabbit hole.
In Biodiversity, a glass fish includes a few group of Asian fishes that show crystal transparent bodies to hide from predators. Specially when young. They are vertebrates that evolved transparent muscles. Two gens are kept in aquariums: Parambassis ranga and several ghost catfish from gen Kriptopterus.
We can assume that the programmer likes aquariums. The word Yakarta is not random, as is related with the catfishes distribution.
Jakarta was chosen by the Eclipse Foundation because it is the largest city on the island of Java, and Oracle is virulently litigious around the Java trademark.
In a way, yes, GlassFish is a Java framework. Although also much more.
It allows running and manage applications on a server, which provides resources to the applications. And it also allows building standalone Java applications, with the server embedded in it, in a way that you would expect from a framework.
On top of that, it provides standard Jakarta EE APIs, so your applications don't need GlassFish, you can run them on other servers too. Or you can easily migrte from other servers and frameworks to GlassFish if you like it more. And you can learn Jakarta EE APIs even before you will use GlassFish, or hire somebody who already knows it even though they never used GlassFish.
I thought that was Tomcat or was Tomcat just the servlet reference implementation, i can't remember. App servers like Glassfish were what operations people used before the concept of "devops". Developers wrote the code and admins/ops deployed the code on app servers like Glassfish. Devops was supposed to put developers in charge of the whole stack but every enterprise i've seen have a dedicated devops team that manages AWS/Azure/GCP and separate developer teams who write the code. So it's pretty much the same it's always been ironically.
> I thought that was Tomcat or was Tomcat just the servlet reference implementation
Tomcat itself has never been an official reference implementation of anything.
Tomcat implements various Jakarta EE APIs, most centrallly Servlet indeed, but also JSP (Jakarta Pages) and JSTL (Jakarta Tags), WebSockets and Jakarta Authentication.
The initial Tomcat was donated to Apache, then used back in GlassFish. GlassFish WAS the reference implementation of Servlet (among others), so indirectly Tomcat kinda was the reference implementation indeed. But just a fork of its code via GlassFish.
Nope. From the glassfish.org web page: "Eclipse GlassFish is a lightweight yet powerful open-source application server that fully implements the Jakarta EE platform."
It solves some of the same problems you might reach for Kubernetes or OpenShift for, your application gets access to external resources in structured ways and you get to look at dashboards.
GlassFish is an example of such an application server. WildFly is more common, and is the artist formerly known as JBoss. If you have some knowledge in the enterprise Java ecosystem you can quickly and easily (or maybe not, it depends) deploy your creations into these.