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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Platform as a Service
  4. Web Servers
  5. GlassFish vs Unicorn

GlassFish vs Unicorn

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Unicorn
Unicorn
Stacks479
Followers401
Votes295
GitHub Stars1.5K
Forks269
GlassFish
GlassFish
Stacks581
Followers112
Votes0

GlassFish vs Unicorn: What are the differences?

Developers describe GlassFish as "The Open Source Java EE Reference Implementation". An Application Server means, It can manage Java EE applications You should use GlassFish for Java EE enterprise applications. The need for a seperate Web server is mostly needed in a production environment. On the other hand, Unicorn is detailed as "Rack HTTP server for fast clients and Unix". Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.

GlassFish and Unicorn can be categorized as "Web Servers" tools.

Unicorn is an open source tool with 1.35K GitHub stars and 249 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Unicorn's open source repository on GitHub.

Instacart, Shopify, and Typeform are some of the popular companies that use Unicorn, whereas GlassFish is used by Kanteron Systems, Analytical Informatics, and GameDuell. Unicorn has a broader approval, being mentioned in 208 company stacks & 266 developers stacks; compared to GlassFish, which is listed in 5 company stacks and 4 developer stacks.

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Detailed Comparison

Unicorn
Unicorn
GlassFish
GlassFish

Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.

An Application Server means, It can manage Java EE applications You should use GlassFish for Java EE enterprise applications. The need for a seperate Web server is mostly needed in a production environment.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
1.5K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
269
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
479
Stacks
581
Followers
401
Followers
112
Votes
295
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 81
    Fast
  • 59
    Performance
  • 36
    Web server
  • 30
    Very light
  • 30
    Open Source
Cons
  • 4
    Not multithreaded
No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to Unicorn, GlassFish?

NGINX

NGINX

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.

Apache HTTP Server

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.

Microsoft IIS

Microsoft IIS

Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks.

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

Passenger

Passenger

Phusion Passenger is a web server and application server, designed to be fast, robust and lightweight. It takes a lot of complexity out of deploying web apps, adds powerful enterprise-grade features that are useful in production, and makes administration much easier and less complex.

Gunicorn

Gunicorn

Gunicorn is a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby's Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with various web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources, and fairly speedy.

Jetty

Jetty

Jetty is used in a wide variety of projects and products, both in development and production. Jetty can be easily embedded in devices, tools, frameworks, application servers, and clusters. See the Jetty Powered page for more uses of Jetty.

lighttpd

lighttpd

lighttpd has a very low memory footprint compared to other webservers and takes care of cpu-load. Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd the perfect webserver-software for every server that suffers load problems.

Swoole

Swoole

It is an open source high-performance network framework using an event-driven, asynchronous, non-blocking I/O model which makes it scalable and efficient.

Puma

Puma

Unlike other Ruby Webservers, Puma was built for speed and parallelism. Puma is a small library that provides a very fast and concurrent HTTP 1.1 server for Ruby web applications.

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