Last Updated on April 21, 2022
Oracle is a computer technology corporation best known for its software products and services like Java.
In 2020, Oracle was the second-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. They employ over 130,000 people, and sell cloud-engineering services and systems and database management systems.
Oracle has a fairly prominent position with open source. They are a supporting member of the Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, and the Java Community Process.
Through its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010, Oracle also became the steward of many other important and long-running open source projects such as the Java programming language and the MySQL relational database, introduced in 1995. The acquisition of Sleepycat Software, brought the open source Berkeley DB key/value store.
The company co-develops the OpenJDK, an open source implementation of the Java Platform Standard Edition, and Btrfs, a B-tree file system. They also open source the Oracle Coherence Community Edition, NetBeans, and produce Oracle Linux which is a Linux distro compiled from Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code.
While Oracle develops and distributes open source software, they have many different business models. The majority of their products are published under a proprietary license. This series looks at free and open source alternatives to Oracle’s products.
Oracle OC4J (Oracle Containers for J2EE) is a slimmed down version of Oracle Application Server.
What are the best free and open source alternatives?
1. TomEE
Apache TomEE, pronounced “Tommy”, is an all-Apache Jakarta EE 9.1 certified application server extending Apache Tomcat.
TomEE comes with four different flavors, Web Profile, MicroProfile, Plus and Plume. Apache TomEE Web Profile delivers Servlets, JSP, JSF, JTA, JPA, CDI, Bean Validation and EJB Lite. Apache TomEE MicroProfile adds support for MicroProfile. Apache TomEE Plus and Plume add support for JMS, JAX-WS and more.
2. Wildfly
WildFly (previously known as JBoss) is a powerful, modular and lightweight application server.
It offers a fast startup, small footprint, modular design, unified configuration/management, and Jakarta EE.
3. Apache Geronimo
Apache Geronimo is an open source server runtime that integrates open source projects to create Java/OSGi server runtimes that meet the needs of enterprise developers and system administrators.
Note the omission of Tomcat and Jetty is deliberate, as neither of them are really a full application server. This is because they act only as a Web server and Servlet container. Neither program provides the full feature set from the Java EE. But they are excellent open source software. Tomcat is hugely popular, and Jetty has some unique deployment methods that can provide many benefits to development teams.
All articles in this series:
| Alternatives to Oracle's Products | |
|---|---|
 | Business Intelligence is business analytics software that offers an integrated, end-to-end Enterprise Performance Management System. |
 | Business Process Management is a complete set of tools for creating, executing, and optimizing business processes. |
 | Database is a multi-model database management system often used for running online transaction processing, data warehousing and mixed database workloads. |
 | JDeveloper covers the full development lifecycle from design through coding, debugging, optimization and profiling to deploying. |
| OC4J (Oracle Containers for J2EE) is a slimmed down version of Oracle Application Server. |
 | MySQL is a relational database management system. It runs as a server and allows multiple users to manage and create numerous databases. |
 | Siebel CRM delivers a combination of transactional, analytical, and engagement features to manage all customer-facing operations. |
 | TopLink is a mapping and persistence framework for Java developers. It is an object-persistence and object-transformation framework. |
| Web Cache is a secure reverse proxy cache and a compression engine deployed between a browser and web server/content management server. |
Interesting