Many people rely on vibes from the past instead of updating their knowledge with the current info. It's true that some companies in the past attempted to taint GlassFish to promote their alternative products. And there was nobody to defend GlassFish and keep it up to date.
This is different now, with GlassFish at the Eclipse Foundation, the OmniFish company behind it and providing enterprise guarantees, and GlassFish itself modernizing with fast startup, runnable JAR, support for latest Java and Jakarta EE, Jakarta Data and NoSQL databases.
But is it what everybody really wants? To have a single choice? GlassFish provides a choice for those that don't want to become stuck with the "only" option that everybody uses. Java itself provides a lot of options - Oracle JDK, Azul JDK, Corretto JDK and many others. And that's a good thing. Options in frameworks and application servers are a good thing too. The best option wins. Except, there's rarely the best option for every case. And it's good to have all the other options too, in case the most popular option isn't a good one for you.
IMO the kind of person who only knows Spring and doesn't understand modern JEE is exactly the kind of person you don't want to recruit.
The same is true for Micronaught or Quarkus. Learn the frameworks. But they are not a new open standard.
People don't really talk about Jakarta EE as "the standard". Haven't been doing that for quite some time.
You learn it so you don't hand Spring the ultimate monopoly. I thought we all didn't like monopolies? Why give Broadcom one?
Newer frameworks like Quarkus are specifically built for container usage and applications built with it are a bit faster and smaller than Spring boot.
FWIW Wasm is hitting kubernetes because that's what customers are explicitly asking for, and the majority of enterprise Wasm-on-k8s afopters are doing so precisely because they want to eradicate Spring bloat and the associated supply chain risks from their engineering orgs.
I use jersey+glassfish to build very small micro-profile applications. It's stable, small and works.
Not a fan of the HK2 dpendency injector though. Maybe that's my general dislike of how convoluted the spec and implementation (of EE di) is.
I hate how sprawling the (other) implementations are, no it is not ok to pull in 90mb dependencies to support things I don't need. These app servers tend to grow into huge uncontrollable messes. Nobody uses standalone containers anymore and forcing people to pull in all or nothing for the embedded version is just asinine engineering.
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.
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.
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.
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.e. in the same space as Jboss/Wildfly, WebSphere, etc)
Historically, it was also the reference implementation application server for J2EE.
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.