Medavie Blue Cross - Standards Eliminating Vendor Lock-In

More important references from this week's GlassFish Portfolio Launch. From Sun's February 10, 2009 Press Release:

Medavie Blue Cross is a leading Canadian health insurance provider that offers health, travel, life and income replacement products to group and individual customers. "As the Java Platform Enterprise Edition 5 (Java EE) reference implementation built in open source, the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server eliminates our concern of vendor lock- in," said Vince Blanchard, director of Architecture and New Technology, Medavie Blue Cross. "We are able to leverage open source innovations and Java EE standards much more rapidly."

Posted at 05:09PM Feb 14, 2009 by Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart in Health  | 

T-Mobile, High Availability and GlassFish

This week's GlassFish Portfolio Launch included several customer references that are important enough to merit a spotlight, even without our usual Questionnaire.

From Sun's February 10, 2009 Press Release:

"High availability allows us to meet our stringent uptime requirements and the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server enables us to cost-effectively deploy new services while meeting our performance and availability requirements," said Erez Yarkoni, vice president, T-Mobile, USA.

Posted at 05:08PM Feb 14, 2009 by Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart in Telecommunications  | 

SFR - Developer APIs, GlassFish-powered

If you're a Vodafone customer and have traveled to France, you've been using the SFR cellular network, the second largest in the country with 19 Million subscribers (almost 5 million 3G subscribers) and number one European non-historical telecom operator.

Project RED (Rich Enabler Distribution), the code name of the "SFR Developer Zone" Initiative (devzone.ateliersfr.fr), offers developer APIs to access the SFR core network features such as sending SMS, MMS, geo-localizing mobile devices, ... and has chosen to deploy on GlassFish in clustered mode and MySQL. The services have been live since last November (2008) with good feedback from the developers community.

This experience started with a prototype developed on Tomcat which was then industrialized on top of GlassFish. The clustering feature of the application server has been a crucial point to scale to the demand of the developers. OpenMQ is also part of the technical solution. Read all the details in this questionnaire.

Posted at 09:00AM Feb 12, 2009 by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine in Telecommunications  | 

Szeretgom.hu - from virtual to local communities and back with GlassFish

Szeretgom.hu is a site powered by GlassFish Portfolio: both application server (GlassFish v3 Prelude) and web server (v7.0). János Cserép, the author of this local community site for the town and region of Esztergom, Hungary, has had a long history with Sun infrastructure software.

The site offers social networking features and content management to "enhance transparency of local events, politics, culture by allowing everyone to contribute and share information with everyone else" as explained in this document. The number of features grew over the past few years to now offers forums, blogs, events calendar, news, galleries, collaborative wiki, ads, online interviews, calling hours for council representatives, and a "Friends" feature under development to 1150 registered users.

János is now taking the project one step further by productizing and generifying the development to produce a reusable white label social networking platform. As always, you can read about the technical details in the detailed questionnaire. OpenSolaris, Wicket, and Hudson are part of the list of technical choices. Follow the link to find out more.

Posted at 07:00AM Feb 10, 2009 by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine in Travel  | 

Rakuten, really big in Japan and eCommerce

If you live in Japan, you know that Rakuten is an equivalent to Yahoo or eBay. For everyone else Wikipedia tells us that "Rakuten is among the Top 10 largest Internet companies in the world (along with Amazon.com, InterActive Corporation (IAC), Expedia, etc.)" and provides "Japan's largest online retail marketplace".

While GlassFish production usage at Rakuten is still pretty recent, it does use clustering and the engineering leader who answered the questionnaire (whose name we couldn't mention unfortunately) calls it a "nice middle ground" (compared to other solutions such as Tomcat or Weblogic). She also suggests a few enhancements which you can find, along with other interesting tidbits, in the detailed questionnaire (original Japanese version here).

Rakuten's online shopping business (one of 8 major lines of business for the company), Rakuten Ichiba, is the largest online shopping mall in Japan, and allows customers to shop more than 18 million products from over 25,000 merchants. The number of Rakuten members is now above 42 Million (which is one third the country total population). Looks like a nice growth perspective for GlassFish to me!

Posted at 02:12PM Jan 08, 2009 by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine in eCommerce  | 

楽天でのGlassFish運用

日本にお住まいなら、楽天の名前を聞いたことがない人はいないでしょう。楽天市場をはじめとして、クレジット事業、ポータル事業、トラベル事業、証券事業、はてはプロ野球まで、幅広い事業を手がける一大企業です。

楽天における本番環境でのGlassFish運用は比較的最近はじまった事ですが、アンケートにお答え頂いたエンジニアリーダによれば、TomcatとWebLogicの中間的な位置をしめるのが「ほどよい感じ」だとの事です。この他にも、本番環境では重要となる幾つかの機能の改善が必要だとの指摘を頂きました。これらを含むインタビューの全文はここから見てください。

楽天市場は、日本でもっとも大きなオンラインショッピングサイトで、１８００万点以上の商品を二万五千のお店から購入することが出来ます。会員数も４２００万を数えるとのことです。楽天でのGlassFishの運用がもっと広まるといいですね！

Posted at 02:11PM Jan 08, 2009 by Kohsuke Kawaguchi in eCommerce  |  Comments[0]

Clarity Accounting: Online Accounting Software using GWT and Hibernate with GlassFish

Are you a small business or self employed professional looking for a SaaS accounting solution ? Clarity Accounting provides an online accounting solution by building a simple flexible model with plenty of access to information. 

The solution is hosted on 3tera AppLogic Grid using Linux on commodity Intel hardware. The solution use traditional EJB, Servlet and Web services for the core infrastructure. Hibertate and Hibernate Search are used for database abstraction with PostgreSQL backend. Google Web Toolkit is used for the user interface.

They use GlassFish as the application server because they were recommended it is the "best one to start with". They also like it because of better standards compliance with EJB3 and dont-have-to-edit-XML-configuration file approach possible because of admin console.

The detailed GlassFish questionnaire provide additional details on all of the above.

Posted at 11:00PM Dec 28, 2008 by Arun Gupta in OnlineServices  |  Comments[4]

ACA IT-Solutions deploys OpenSSO at Telenet for fine-grained access control

Telenet is a leading supplier for media and telecom services in Belgium, providing broadband Internet, multi-media, fixed-line and mobile telephony and digital TV services to residential and professional clients in Flanders and Brussels. When they needed fine-grained control of employee access to internal applications, they turned to ACA IT-Solutions, probably the largest and most successful independent Java solution provider in Benelux.

ACA, having long experience with Sun Access Manager, selected OpenSSO to provide fine-grained access control, using it as a central policy administration point (PAP) and developing a distributed policy decision point (PDP) to allow massive scaling and fault tolerance.

Read the full questionnaire to learn exactly why ACA selected OpenSSO for this critical role, and how "being able to dive into the source code often proved to be very useful for documentation's sake or making very subtle customisations." As Serge Craeghs of ACA writes, "Hey, who doesn't want to be in control? :)". Who indeed?

Posted at 06:00AM Dec 12, 2008 by Andrew Patterson in Telecommunications  |  Comments[1]

Deslatech: EAI for Brazilian Hospitals

Deslatech is a System Integrator in Brazil. They build a solution for KitMed - a logistics operator that operates warehouse and pharmacy of multiple hospitals in Brazil. This involved synchronization of products and price lists and transfer of purchase orders and electronics invoices across several geographically distributed centers. 

It is a traditional EAI application that requires message transformation and processes dynamic and complex business rules. Deslatech picked GlassFish because of the interoperability and flexibility provided by the container.

The solution is based on OpenESB and OpenMQ is used to handle processing bottlenecks and transient failures. GlassFish and NetBeans integration helped them with their time-to-market challenge. The different applications use Oracle, SQL Server and Informix as database backends.

There has been no downtime in past 2 months because of GlassFish.

The detailed GlassFish questionnaire provide additional details on all of the above.

Posted at 05:54AM Dec 08, 2008 by Arun Gupta in Health  |  Comments[1]

Apologic, expanding market, new architecture with GlassFish

Depending on which part of the world you live in, home care services can be nascent or well established. In Europe and in France in particular, this is a big market growing fast (most likely with the population growing older) and now expanding beyond healthcare with baby-sitting, homework support, and more. The functional requirements for all these use-cases have grown rapidly.

Apologic, an ISV part of the larger "Cheque Dejeuner" Group, has been in the market for almost 20 years with most recently WinDev RAD technology-powered applications. With the evolving scalability and portability requirements they faced and after a technical evaluation process, the company moved on to use a Java EE 5 architecture powered by GlassFish with a Swing JavaWebStart'ed Rich client.

JPA (Toplink Essentials) and JAX-WS (Metro) are the key server-side technologies used by Apologic together with a Postgres back-end database. NetBeans has been a key technology in the building of the architecture (that's how they discovered GlassFish) and the development phase : the Matisse GUI builder for the Swing client, the integrated profiler, and of course the GlassFish integration.

As always, check out the detailed GlassFish questionnaire which, this time, contains several application screenshots. You'll read more about the other technologies used by Apologic and what they expect from GlassFish v3.

Posted at 03:00AM Nov 06, 2008 by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine in HomeCareServices  |  Comments[1]

Ipso-Facto: Real Estate SaaS with GlassFish

Ipso-Facto builds and delivers real estate software as a service for the French market. They've been running GlassFish v2 in production for a little while now. Enough to call it "mature, recommend (it) for professional use" and start the rewrite of older applications to run on top of this Java EE server.

This company used to be a full Microsoft shop and first moved to Java with Tomcat before they adopted GlassFish. Their largest application, LogissimoASP, uses many JSF components from various sources, and operates in a Microsoft environment: Windows 2003 and SQL Server 2005. This application recently started using the clustering and load-balancing features provided by GlassFish v2 to secure the availability of the service which now has hundreds of concurrent users and spikes at well-known moments in the day.

As always, you're invited to read the detailed questionnaire for this Ipso-Facto GlassFish production story.

Posted at 01:42AM Nov 03, 2008 by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine in OnlineServices  |  Comments[0]

SSOCircle Uses OpenSSO to Provide an Open Identity Provider Service

SSOCircle is an open identity provider that supports multiple protocols for federated single sign-on. One of the first production deployments of OpenSSO, SSOCircle went live in February 2007 with support for SAML 2.0, adding OpenID a couple of months later (see SSOCircle-related posts at Superpatterns).

If you're working with federation technologies, SSOCircle is an incredibly useful resource - in the case of SAML 2.0, you can register your service provider metadata with SSOCircle and test single sign-on from SSOCircle to your site. With OpenID, of course, this isn't necessary - just type your OpenID URL (something like http://myname.ssocircle.com/) at an OpenID relying party and you're in business.

One particularly nice feature of the site is that they have configured OpenSSO's client certificate login, so you can use a browser or smartcard certificate to authenticate, rather than username/password. Convenience!

SSOCircle's latest offering is IDPee - a white label hosted identity provider service. Currently in beta (apply here), this looks like an interesting option if you don't want to be running an identity provider in your own infrastructure.

Read the full questionnaire and Liberty Alliance case study [PDF] for much more detail on SSOCircle.

Posted at 06:00AM Oct 27, 2008 by Andrew Patterson in OnlineServices  |  Comments[2]

CDOVaR.net does online Risk and Pricing with OpenDS

CDO² is a a provider of innovative pricing and risk technologies. Hosted on Sun Network.com infrastructure, CDOVaR.net is a service provided by CDO² for structured credit pricing and risk, which allows financial institutions to transparently harness grid computing to manage their portfolios.

For user management, authentication and authorization, CDOVaR.net was looking for a Java based LDAP directory server, mainly to reduce the dependence on native code. After a trial period in the staging environment, replacing the existing LDAP product, OpenDS was adopted and allowed significant improvements in the systems deployment and the use of directory services.

As Dominic Cleal of CDO² writes: "We found OpenDS much simpler to deploy to a new environment, with far less dependencies and far easier to configure out of the box."

Make sure you read the full questionnaire for OpenDS adoption by CDOVaR.net for additional details on all of the above, and more.

Posted at 07:38AM Oct 24, 2008 by Ludovic Poitou in Banking  |  Comments[0]

Advantech's not-so-secret toolbox: GlassFish, OpenESB, OpenSSO, Metro, etc...

Israel-based Advantech has agreed to share their success stories working with the GlassFish application, OpenESB and other Sun-sponsored open source technologies. Both stories discussed in the detailed questionnaire use GlassFish as a foundation for either OpenESB 2.0 or the large Java CAPS SOA product from Sun.

Business issues solved with those technologies range from a human workflow system to integration between legacy billing system and front-end CRM and customer portal. More technical uses of the GlassFish/OpenESB duo by Advantech include a throttling proxy. The deployment operating systems and back-end databases constitue a pretty good representation of the "usual suspects".

Beyond the list of just about all the GlassFish features used (yet another OpenMQ user by the way), Advantech's Dror Yaffe, Chief Architect of their Java Division goes on to list the various integration challenges faced and the sophisticated set of frameworks and libraries used. They range from OpenSSO, the Spring framework, AS400 integration with jt400, or project Metro. Make sure you read the details here. Finally, beyond a nice "Java EE by the book" comment, Dror mentions GlassFish's "High Availability Architecture" as the thing he likes best about GlassFish. Very nice.

Posted at 12:16PM Oct 15, 2008 by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine in eCommerce  |  Comments[0]

Bauer Systems - Online and paper media with GlassFish

Bauer Systems, a GlassFish user has been in the business of Media production (both print and online) for more than 130 years. They use a broad range of technologies from Java EE 5 to NetBeans, Oracle, JavaDB (yes, two different databases for different requirements), EJBs, Web Services, JMS, and some SOA.

The development effort for the GlassFish-powered applications so far has roughly been 20 person years. Development happens on a broad range of platforms while production is on Linux. Documentation quality was one of the deciding factor for Bauer to go with GlassFish. They are yet another user of OpenMQ but also JBI (in the form of OpenESB), and probably the first user to call out the GlassFish logo and t-shirts as one of their favorite product feature!

As always, make sure you read the Full Questionnaire for GlassFish adoption by Bauer Systems for more details on all of the above.

Posted at 02:35AM Sep 10, 2008 by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine in Media  |  Comments[3]