Lev Lazinskiy

What is GlassFish?

I jumped down another rabbit hole trying to figure out how to get started with java ee without using an ide. Although IDE’s are very handy when it comes to Java development, they also are sometimes a crutch. For instance, if you want to transition to CI, do you actually know what commands the IDE runs when you right click and run tests?

First, I have no idea what Java EE actually is. There is something called GlassFish, which is an open source Java EE “reference implementation”. It also the same thing that is installed when you go to the main Java EE website.

Java EE does not support the latest Java JDK 1.9. On my Mac I had a tough time trying to get two versions of Java to run at the same time.

I think 99.9% of all tutorials about getting started with Java EE include using Netbeans or Eclipse. I wanted to write one that used the CLI. This involves using maven.

Maven has a concept called “archetypes” which creates the necessary directory structure for a new Java project. The main problem is that I could not find a bare bones archetype definition.

At the end of the day, I dug deep into the rabbit hole and came up empty. I will figure this out at some point and write a blog post about it.