The beta version of Tomcat 7 came out last week. This is a Big Deal! Tomcat has been at various times the reference implementation of Java Servlets, and Tomcat 7 now includes support for the latest version of the Servlet spec. Then there's GlassFish -- once Sun's, now Oracle's. While still crucial to the whole Java project as the reference implementation of Java EE, many people have questioned Oracle's commitment to it, as it competes with Oracle's other (paid, closed source) app server offerings. The official GlassFish roadmap still exudes optimism, but Douglas Dooley is glummer, suggesting that the GlassFish team is starved of resources.

The two servers are important rivals, in a sense: Tomcat is the foundation for SpringSource's server offerings, and SpringSource is of course conceived of as an alternative to the Java EE for which GlassFish is a reference implementation. Thus it's important for SpringSource that Tomcat is moving forward as it is. The flipside is that GlassFish is important for Java EE, which makes its own progress important for Java as a whole. Dooley suggests that it just be handed over to Google, which may make something interesting of it; the chances of this happening strike me as essentially nil, but lacking obvious investment from Oracle it's hard to say what the benefit to anyone keeping it where it is might be. Just keeping it so that nobody else can have it isn't a helpful reason to control something; but it may be that it's the whole rationale behind Oracle's takeover of Java in the first place.