In the past I have chosen to use the commercial version of Glassfish (Sun Java Application Server 9.0), because it comes with a graphical installer and our customers have the option to buy support for it. Other than those two differences, they are exactly the same product. When used on Windows, the SJAS graphical installer has a checkbox on one of the screens to create a Windows service. Glassfish does not come with a graphical installer, and requires a full JDK for installation. It is still simple to install, but lacks an easy way to create a Windows service.

The final release date for Glassfish V2 (and also Sun Java Application Server 9.1) is September 17 2007. I've been using Glassfish V2 lately because of the features, performance, and I wanted to make sure that my apps run on it. The instructions to create a Windows service look like this:

It may be simple enough to change the paths to match your own to get this to work, unless there are spaces such as C:\Program Files\Sun\GlassfishV2\. Try figuring out the correct sequences of escaping the escape characters etc. After over an hour I had it almost working, but still failed. When I asked Sun for help they provided me with the few lines of source code from the Sun Java Application Platform SDK graphical installer that builds the properly escaped command line. I turned this into a command line utility that is very simple to use.

The simplest way to use the utility is to copy GlassfishSvc.jar to your Glassfish installation path (such as C:\Program Files\Sun\GlassfishV2\), then run the following command from the command line:

The -i argument will install the service with default options. A complete listing of the command line arguments follows:

Download links: GlassfishSvc.jar, GlassfishSvc.java

I hope that there are Glassfish users who find this utility helpful, and that the Glassfish project either links to this utility from their installation manual or adopts it as part of the project. There is no license, do what you want with it.

Sep 6 2007 UPDATE: I have since learned about a couple of important issues related to running Glassfish as a Windows service.

• 1) After you log out of Windows the java.exe process will terminate. Meanwhile, the appservService.exe Windows service wrapper that comes with Glassfish will continue to run, and Windows will think that the service is still running. The JVM has a built in feature that shuts itself down when it receives an event from Windows indicating that a user is logging out. You can disable this "feature" by adding the -Xrs JVM option to Glassfish's domain.xml. In Glassfish's domains\domain1\config\ folder you will find domain.xml. Open the file and search for jvm-options. You'll see that each JVM option is on it's own line inside of an XML element. Add a new line using the same syntax, but with the -Xrs option. Save then restart the Glassfish Windows service for the change to take effect.
• 2) If you are running the cluster profile, Glassfish will ask for the admin password every time the service starts. This was a bit confusing to me because it only asked for a password on some computers and not others. Later, it asked for a password on all computers. You need to create a password file in a specific format and tell the Windows service to use it. Luckily the GlassfishSvc.jar tool that I wrote has a -p option to do exactly that. The -p option creates a file called password.txt in Glassfish's root directory. You should use NTFS security options to ensure that only the "Local system account" (the service) can read/write this file.