alt Hacker NewsWhy would you compare Eclipse GlassFish instead to Payara or Wildfly/JBoss? Anyway, that bickering between JEE application server vendors is what caused Spring to win. It doesn't matter it has update churn that is almost as bad as in JS ecosystem, just the fact you don't have to think about AS helped adoption. Well that and significantly easier testing. And Spring Data with generating queries from method names. And you can't recruit people with JEE knowledge anyway, they all know only Spring.
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People like simple life with as few choices they have to make as possible, right? It's now very simple to start a Java project, when the obvious choice is Spring and everybody uses it.
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.
Yet the WebAssembly bros are into replicating application servers with Kubernetes pods running WebAssembly containers, go figure.
Spring and JEE (or Quarkus) are very similar, from the viewpoint of an application developer both have the same JAX-RS REST and Hibernate/JPA API's.
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.