In one of the first results of its $1 billion purchase of MySQL, Sun Microsystems has packaged the popular open source database with its GlassFish application server and is offering the two as a $65,000-per-year bundle.
Sun has struggled so far to field a competitive application server, the software that handles thousands of Web site requests at a time, obtaining a response from a running application or database, and feeding it to all the users who wanted it. It's one of the pieces of middleware that makes a common application scalable to Web dimensions. The dominant commercial products are IBM's WebSphere and BEA Systems' (now Oracle's) WebLogic, followed by Oracle's homegrown Oracle Application Server. JBoss has been a fourth contender, dominant among the open source contenders.
But Sun is back, launching a "disruptive" play that seeks to pair up GlassFish with the hugely popular open source database it purchased in late February. Its chief target is not fellow open source supplier JBoss, now a division of Linux distributor Red Hat, but the traditional commercial software providers that charge license fees and maintenance costs for their products.
Oracle has its own ambitions for a greater share of the Java application server market and has invested heavily in Oracle Application Server and in purchasing BEA Systems for $7.2 billion last January. If Sun and Oracle emerge as head-to-head competitors, it will be carefully watched how well they continue to work as partners. Oracle controls one of the key storage engines in MySQL, InnoDB, which it acquired by buying a Finnish firm, Inno Oy, in 2005.
GlassFish is both a standard -- it's the reference implementation of an application server for Java Enterprise Edition 5 -- and it's a popular open source project hosted by Sun at http://java.sun.com/javaee/community/glassfish/.
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