My involvement at OmniFish and what I realized at DevNexus last week
Ondro Mihályi
Hi, all,
Last week I attended DevNexus, and I realized one thing that surprised me. Almost 3 years after leaving Payara, even some of my friends don’t know that I did it and what I do now. So I’d like to share that with you, because what me and my team is doing now has a great impact on Jakarta EE, much bigger than what I was part of at Payara.
In 2022, half a year before GlassFish 7 and Jakarta EE 10 were released, I left Payara. and co-founded OmniFish company. I founded it together with Arjan Tijms and David Matejcek, awesome people, great friends, and deep-dive experts in GlassFish and Jakarta EE. The main objective of OmniFish is building products with GlassFish and Jakarta EE and supporting our customers and the community using them. We believe Jakarta EE is an essential part of our success and a huge value for the whole Java community so we want to contribute to it as much as possible. And we’ve acted accordingly:
In 2022, OmniFish put a lot of effort to integrate all Jakarta EE 10 components to GlassFish 7 so that GlassFish can be used as the first CI to release EE 10 ASAP
For Jakarta EE 11, our Arjan Tijms served as a co-coordinator of the whole Jakarta EE 11 release
We’re working on shaping the TCK for EE 11 and on GlassFish 8 to be used again as the first CI to allow EE 11 release ASAP
Multiple people from OmniFish participated in Jakarta EE 10 and 11 API improvements (Faces, Security, Concurrency, …)
We’re also working on a new opensource implementation of Jakarta Data for JPA, in collab with the JNoSQL team, which would be reusable in other servers and also as a standalone library outside of a Jakarta EE container
And, of course, we keep improving the Eclipse GlassFish server and collaborate on a new lightweight opensource Jakarta EE runtime called Piranha Cloud.
If you look at the level of Payara company activity in Jakarta EE and the slow pace of Payara Server evolution, you’ll understand that I wouldn’t be able to do even a fraction of this if I stayed at Payara. And we do that with much smaller funding, as our company started from zero, without any investor or huge customers that would fund us.
Thank you all for your support and I hope you can spread info about what we do. E.g. that:
We’re now the OmniFish company, a Jakarta EE member company
We actively participate in Jakarta EE and work with the community.
We continuously improve GlassFish, which is now production-ready (again), modernized and lighter than ever
We provide commercial support for GlassFish, which is definitely worth if to anybody who builds serious applications on top of GlassFish
You can also let us know if you appreciate what we do, or subscribe to our blog at https://omnifish.ee/glassfish-community/.
If you’d like to support us in doing more of it in the future, you could also help us fund these activities if you recommend our commercial services to anybody who might be interested, or even sponsor us via Github sponsors at https://github.com/sponsors/OmniFish-EE.
Anything might help us do even more Jakarta EE opensource goodness for you. Not only for our customers, but also for the benefit of the whole Java ecosystem.
