Call me eager, call me insane, I had a JavaEE 6 app up and running in production on Glassfish 3.0 one month after it’s release. The improvements in JSF 2 and CDI were too compelling for me to hold off adopting, and sure enough, the application was quick and painless to develop.

I did however pay a price for being an early adopter - a Glassfish / Weld bug was preventing my JSF login pages from working. Fortunately I was able to quickly find an (ugly) workaround to get me going using JSPs. This brings me to the interesting nugget of this post: the story of my first use of our Glassfish v3 support contract.

I promptly reported the bug to Glassfish, using the support tools provided, and was overall impressed at how quickly the bug was isolated, and a resolution was found. All I had to do was wait for the patch, and my problem would disappear. So I waited for the patch. And waited. And waited…

I reported the bug in January, and heard of a fix in February. The patched release was supposed to come out in March. By May, there was still no release. I made a little noise, and got some attention from both Glassfish support, and the Glassfish Community, but was told the release was delayed by Oracle buying Sun, and the associated “Change in Control”. I was however assured that the release was imminent.

Sure enough, Glassfish 3.0.1 was released June 17th, with the fix to my bug - a turnaround of 5 months. While annoyed that I had to wait so long for the fix, I do appreciate having that support structure in place to ensure we get our apps working. I’m just glad we had a workaround.

Here’s to looking forward to a regular release schedule for Glassfish patches!