iTAC Software MES, 3 million calls a day

Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) are probably as critical as the web site of an Internet company. iTAC Software explains here how, only 6 months after they found out about the technology, they are using GlassFish as the underpinnings of their iTAC.MES.Suite product to provide direct connection between shop floor devices in manufacturing plants.

iTAC Software operates in industries such as automotive, electronics and medical devices and their software uses a large set of Java EE features such as EJBs, rich IIOP clients, and the Java Connector Architecture to serve up to 3 million hits a day on larger installations. It also includes a reasonable set of Open Source technologies from unit and UI testing to distributed caching such as EHCache.

Make sure you read the full questionnaire, including Volker Burch's take on why Open Source is an obvious choice for an ISV like iTAC Software.

Posted at 10:19AM Apr 25, 2008 by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine in Industrial  |  Comments[0]

GlassFish v2 and JRuby powering WorldxChange Communications NZ's online billing system

WorldxChange Communications NZ have just won the NZ Telecommunications Carrier of the Year 2007. While looking at their competitors they decided to refocus their efforts towards an online system to actively view their call records and past history information for our customers verses making sure they grow their customer base, see Grant McLaren's comments from WorldxChange Communications NZ here.

The project started out as a Proof Of Concept, 8 weeks later, it went live, see ViewBill Portal Link. The ViewBill Portal Link project is based on JRuby, GlassFish v2 and NetBeans 6.1. One of the reasons they chose NetBeans, GlassFish and JRuby was, as Grant McLaren puts it, "I came across Glassfish. From my perspective, the main advantage was that I could deploy my JRuby project war file directly to GlassFish, allowing me to develop and test our online ViewBill portal using a production grade, scalable web server." Since then, WorldxChange Communications NZ have since started using GlassFish v3 with the JRuby gem for testing of new code features before going in to production.

To read through all of WorldxChange Communications NZ's reasons why they chose GlassFish and Jruby, see their full questionnaire here. Here's how WorldxChange Communications NZ summarizes their reasons for using GlassFish and JRuby; Grant McLaren writes, "I do not believe that I could have developed this project any faster using different toolsets or technologies and have been massively impressed with the combination of Glassfish and JRuby." and "I like the fact that it is a production grade web server that is reliable, scalable and packed full of features. As we traditionally use Apache web servers, Glassfish fulfilled the requirements of this project and it was easily incorporated into our existing network. Not too mention being backed by the reputable company Sun, it made Glassfish the perfect choice."

Make sure you visit and read :
- the Full Questionnaire for GlassFish adoption by WorldxChange Communications NZ
- the WorldxChange Communications NZ website

Posted at 07:00AM Apr 21, 2008 by Chris Fleischmann in Telecommunications  |  Comments[1]

Net Entertainment Saves 300,000 Kron a Year with GlassFish

Net Entertainment is market leader in browser based gaming software headquartered in Stockholm. The company recently selected GlassFish v2 after considering competidors from JBoss, IBM or BEA.

We don't have our traditional questionnaire yet, but NetEnt's adoption was highlighted in Computer Sweden, the leading Swedish IT magazine. The article quotes NetEnt's Chief Architect saying they are "Saving 300,000 kronor a year with GF"!

Posted at 11:00PM Apr 17, 2008 by Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart in eCommerce  |  Comments[0]

GlassFish flies for FAA's NASE

The Federal Aviation Administration's NASE department is chartered with developing software to support Radar Systems, Navigation and Landing System, Weather Processors and Sensors amongst others and GlassFish is now used in production in this department.

NASE runs their applications on Solaris on Sun hardware, uses JSF quite extensively (including the WoodStock set of components) along with JPA and Web Services. Hobi Haque clearly states the Web console (admin GUI) as what got them hooked on GlassFish. It's also interesting to note how this adoption of GlassFish came through the use of NetBeans 6 which provides together with GlassFish v2 a very integrated and productive environment to develop Java EE applications. As Hobi puts it - "Setting up JDBC resources, Web Services, and HTTP Services are smooth as a glassfish".

Make sure you read the full questionnaire for this adoption story by the FAA's NASE department.

Posted at 02:40PM Apr 16, 2008 by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine in Government  |  Comments[0]

Reino develops a Web Based Application for Parking Management with GlassFish

Reino International, a division of Saltbush Parking Services, is the largest paid parking equipment and service provider in Australasia and the USA. Established in 1993, Reino International is an Australian owned and operated company with offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, California, Milwaukee, Arkansas as well as being represented throughout Asia and Europe by a distributor network. Reino designs and manufactures parking meters, enforcement technologies and the management systems used to manage and enforce on-street and off-street parking for cities.

Reino decided to use GlassFish as their web based reporting application was based on Java EE 5 based technologies - JSF, JAX-WS and JPA - and the only complete application server which was capable of supporting these technologies at the time was GlassFish. Reino's application has now been in production over 18+ months.

To read through all of Reino's reasons why they chose GlassFish v2, see their full questionnaire here. Here's how Reino summarizes their reasons for using GlassFish; Noel O'Connor writes, "The admin console is very powerful and it is constantly improving. The web service test feature is exceptionally useful." and "We are very impressed with the amount of time and effort Sun has put into GlassFish and the progress that has been made."

Make sure you visit and read :
- the Full Questionnaire for GlassFish adoption by Reino International
- the Reino International website

Posted at 11:49PM Apr 08, 2008 by Chris Fleischmann in Law Enforcement  |  Comments[0]

Fraunhofer Gesellschaft: Ten Hospitals Groups initiates a project, Electronic Case Record

Ten hospital groups across Germany initiated a project to create a reference implementation for recording users of their Health System - an e-Health initiative for Electronic Case Management. The project aims to enhance the communication of electronic case records by specifying a standard for each hospital to follow and GlassFish is a key part of this project.

The reference implementation heavily relies on Web Services for interoperability between the chosen hospitals. The reason for choosing GlassFish over other open source frameworks (for example JBOSS and AXIS2) was for its WSIT support and its promoted Microsoft Interoperability with Microsoft's .Net version 3 WCF technology. If you would like to know more information about WSIT, see the Project Tango Overview.

To read through all of Fraunhofer Gesellschaft's reasons why they chose GlassFish v2, see their full questionnaire here. Here's how Fraunhofer Gesellschaft summarizes their reasons for using GlassFish; Oliver Boehm writes, "The wide development community and the platform independence are the likable benefits".

Make sure you visit and read :
- the Full Questionnaire for GlassFish adoption by Fraunhofer Gesellschaft
- the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft website

Posted at 03:57PM Mar 17, 2008 by Chris Fleischmann in Health  |  Comments[0]

Tune in and listen to the GlassFish @ RTL story

RTL is the #1 radio in France and millions of people wake up listening to the morning show every day. RTL now uses GlassFish for internal and external applications. The public website is at www.rtl.fr and it is conceived as an online continuation of the radio shows providing audio, news, and interaction between listeners and the radio show hosts.

The full questionnaire for this real-world deployment story has further details on the software architecture which includes a nice set of open source frameworks. Here's how RTL summarizes the values of GlassFish : "Simplicity, clustering built-in supervised with the console, really multiplatform, open source, supported by Sun.".

Make sure you visit and read
- the Full Questionnaire for GlassFish adoption by RTL
- the RTL website

Posted at 12:30PM Feb 22, 2008 by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine in Media  |  Comments[0]

Carrefour, GlassFish, Web Services and Microsoft Identity

Carrefour Belgium is now relying on GlassFish to serve as a bridge between an SAP backend system and the company's account synchronization solution. The architecture uses GlassFish's Metro to expose a BAPI (SAP's most used API) as a Web Service. As of this writing, the architecture in production relies on the latest and greatest 9.1 ur1 release which integrates Metro 1.1. NetBeans was used as the IDE to develop the entire code in a record time.

Carrefour Belgium is on track to make more use of the Sun software platform, specifically with the Java CAPS Sun SOA offering which is built on the GlassFish platform.

Make sure you read the full GlassFish questionnaire answered by Julien-Pierre Rousseau of Carrefour Belgium and understand why he calls GlassFish "Easy to use. Offers a short time-to-market, which is good for the business."

Posted at 09:45AM Feb 19, 2008 by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine in Retail  |  Comments[0]

Another customer banking on GlassFish - Banque Degroof Luxembourg

GlassFish is used by a small but fast-paced team of developers from Banque Degroof Luxembourg. Their portfolio management application has been in production for a few months now and they've already experienced the value of being a supported customer to work around a critical bug (fixed in GlassFish v2ur1/SJS Application Server 9.1ur1).

The administration tools seems like the key argument that helped this customer make the GlassFish choice. They are using a Sybase database and also Java CAPS, Sun's SOA offering largely based on Java EE and GlassFish.

As developer Olivier Gerouville puts it: "It is good to work with products that have strong on-line communities, it does make our work easier". You can read the full GlassFish Adoption Questionnaire for more details.

Posted at 12:16AM Dec 19, 2007 by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine in Banking  |  Comments[0]

OKAir and GlassFish powering International Airport

This new GlassFish-v2-in-production story takes us to a Czech International Airport. OK Air, a company specializing in airport software, has developed and deployed a Java EE 5 Airport Information System (AIS) using enterprise-grade GlassFish v2 to deliver valued and timely information to travelers and airport staff.

The software interacts with many external sources in different standard data formats and does so with various techniques varying from JMS to Web Services. For more information, Software architect Ota Kadlec answers the detailed full questionnaire. Many more details can be found there such as the use of SuSE as the deployment platform, the C MQ API, Tomahawk as the JSF component library, etc. Speaking of GlassFish, Ota says it best "Just try it!".

IATA, SITATEX, ATC, FIDS, AMMS, ICAO, ACI, EUROSTAT, FMTP, ... After all, maybe the number of acronyms in the Java world isn't all that exaggerated!

Posted at 02:31PM Nov 30, 2007 by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine in Travel  |  Comments[0]

Numera trusts GlassFish v2 for several payment applications

If you hear that a credit card holder website, a payment gateway, a web application for bank branches, and a call center web application are all running on the same application server software, you might think that this is because it took a lot of persuasion by the software vendor. As it turns out, the software is GlassFish and the effort is really only about making an easy-to-use product.

These particular applications are running on Windows, using mainly the Metro stack to interact with .Net Web Services. They also make use of the Java Persistence API with a MS SQL Server back-end.

Learn how Carlo from Numera, a subsidiary of Banco di Sardegna specializing in IT services, discovered GlassFish, started using it to develop Java EE 5 applications and went into production for those four different applications in this full questionnaire.

Posted at 09:00PM Oct 23, 2007 by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine in Banking  |  Comments[0]

Imixs Software Solutions: more human workflow with GlassFish

Imixs Software Solution specializes in human-based workflow software. This certainly fits into the SOA model but with an emphasis on business processes as opposed to more technical and lover-level services integration.

IMIXS has put its 5-year experience into this open source Imixs IX workflow implementation which was built on top of the Java EE 5 platform and GlassFish. Specifically, Java Persistence (JPA), EJB 3.0, and Web Services API (JAX-WS) are the main new technologies used by Imixs. The workflow modeler is built on top of Eclipse while the client part if fully AJAX-enabled.

Pre-releases of GlassFish v2 have been put to work with the web console, auto-deployment, scalability, and full Java EE 5 conformance listed as the top features justifying GlassFish over other application servers.

Want more info? Try these resources:

• The IMIXS full GlassFish adoption questionnaire.
• Recent German magazine IMIXS Software and GlassFish
• The Open Source Workflow project led by IMIXS.

Posted at 01:33PM Jul 09, 2007 by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine in ISV  |  Comments[0]

GlassFish Powers Knowledgebase at the University of North Carolina

The University of North Carolina has a history of leading. It was founded in 1789 and opened to students in 1795, making it the first public university in the United States (and the only one to offer degrees during the eighteenth century). This trailblazing spirit continues today, albeit with a few twenty-first century twists.

So when they needed to manage the knowledgebase for the Chapel Hill campus' IT infrastructure, the university's Information Technology Services personnel weren't afraid to chart their own path. They set out to build a new document management system, using a few key questions to define its architecture.

As Adam Constabaris describes:

A fundamental question for us in building this application was whether to use Tomcat and "soup it up" by using Spring to add services Tomcat doesn't provide itself, or whether to use a full Java EE container. We could have made it work with the servlet container approach, since our application isn't heavily "enterprisey" and we were initially reluctant to pay the complexity price of EJBs. After looking at the Java EE 5 specification, though, we saw a lot of ways we could simplify and standardize things, such as using JSF 1.2 and coding to the Java Persistence API rather than using Hiberrnate APIs directly.

So where they had assumed Java EE would bring complexity, investigation showed that it actually offered simplification. As you might expect, that made for a pretty obvious choice. And once they'd chosen to use a Java EE container, one question remained: which one? As Adam notes: "Glassfish was the only production quality Java EE compliant container that fit our budget, and so, well, here we are."

Here they are, indeed. The system is now deployed in production, and uses many popular open source frameworks: "Spring and Acegi, Facelets, Tomahawk JSF components, Nux and XOM, Abdera (AtomPub implementation in incubation at Apache), AspectJ, SVNKit, the Sesame RDF Framework... it goes on."

Want more info? Try these resources:

• Adam's full response to the GlassFish adoption questionnaire.
• Informational page for ITS Knowledge Management, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
• Adam's blog.

Posted at 08:25AM Jul 03, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Academia  |  Comments[0]

Retailer Auchan shops for a better open source application server

Big retailers face tough challenges. Any disruption to their supply chain can have a big impact on their profits. Also, covering a lot of territory means having information systems which can handle a diverse set of users spread out over many time zones.

Auchan Russia could be the poster child for such challenges. It's a division of one of the world's largest retailers (Auchan had 1.3 billion customers in 2006). And it certainly has no shortage of territory, given that Russia spans two continents and eleven time zones.

Moving off of Oracle application server, Auchan bet on GlassFish for an application used by thousands of users to manage internal collections and promotional activities. It was chosen over JBoss and Geronimo (Open Source was a key criteria) and the existing application migration was minimal. Spring, Hibernate, Struts and Oracle are the main technologies at work with GlassFish. The management console was considered to be "clear and intuitive that can be used even by support staff with minimal training" and the application running without a hitch for months.

Software Architect Guillaume Bilodeau has some very kind words on his experience :

"GlassFish impressed us from the beginning, particularly because of its intuitive web-based management interface. Deploying the existing applications was painless, requiring us only to write simple deployment descriptors; we did not meet any classloading issues."

You'll find much more information in Guillaume's full response to the GlassFish adoption questionnaire. Enjoy!

Posted at 08:49AM Jun 04, 2007 by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine in Retail  |  Comments[0]

International Environmental: A Cooling Company Which Prefers Hot Software

International Environmental has been providing heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) solutions for over 40 years. They've done work in some of the largest and most famous buildings in the world, including Trump Tower (New York), the Bellagio (Las Vegas), and Times Square (Hong Kong).

Think that sounds like the kind of company which would avoid cutting-edge open source software? Think again.

In early 2006, they were already looking forward to using Java EE 5. Comparing application servers, they found that GlassFish came out on top of JBoss, with "by far, the most complete EE 5 implementation," "much better performance," and an administrative console which was "hands down better."

After completing that evaluation, they set out to replace "various in-house applications" with a new solution running on GlassFish. The results? "With over a year in production, GlassFish has proven to be fast, stable and reliable, and it just keeps getting better." They're now in the planning stages to also migrate the company's "Struts-based, Tomcat-hosted external web site" over to GlassFish (and JSF).

They're using the JSF Reference Implementation, which is also developed as part of Project GlassFish. (Remember, "Project GlassFish" is actually an umbrella which covers the development of many enterprise Java technologies--not just the application server.) Employee Jason Lee is especially active in this area, as one of the developers of the JSF RI.

International Environmental proves that companies in any industry can benefit from using and contributing to GlassFish. Want to learn more about their story? See the full response to the GlassFish adoption questionnaire from Jason Lee, Senior Software Engineer at International Environmental.

Posted at 10:24AM Mar 26, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Industrial  |  Comments[0]