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]

Wotif.com: What if the hottest eCommerce site in Australia ran on GlassFish?

What if you could get a hotel room cheaper by waiting to book it? That simple question led to the creation of Wotif.com. As a date draws near, hotels will often lower the rates for their unbooked rooms rather than have them sit empty. Wotif.com allows consumers to take advantage of this by offering the best "last minute" deals from hotels in 35 countries. Here, last minute means bookings no more than 28 days in advance (which allows them to get the best rates from hotels while still allowing consumers some planning time).

So a great question led to a great idea and a great service, right? Yes, but that isn't the end of the story. True to their name (a quirky spelling of "what if"), the company kept asking questions and seeking answers. For example, the technical team became unsatisfied with the lack of new development and features in the application server that the site had been using. So they asked: what if we switched to "get on a supported and current platform with a future" and "take advantage of new features in the Java EE 5 specification and things built on top of it"? Great question. And after evaluating a few options, they found a great answer: GlassFish.

Once their evaluations were done, it took "a team of 6 about a month" to port the Wotif.com site over to Sun Java System Application Server 9.0, UR1 (Sun's supported distribution of GlassFish v1). In addition to the GlassFish base, they leverage other open source software including Hibernate, Struts, Spring, and ehcache (a distributed caching mechanism). The results are now live in production (running on multiple Sun Fire V40z servers).

Any way you look at it, the Wotif.com site and its volume are impressive. Want concurrent traffic? Their production servers "support around 10,000 concurrent sessions." How about monthly stats? The site averages "almost one million users, who make over 110,000 bookings" each month. Wow. That makes for a lot of happy hotel guests.

Congratulations to everyone at Wotif.com for all of this success! And thank you for allowing Sun and GlassFish to be a part of it.

Want more info? Here are some additional resources:

• The full response to the GlassFish adoption questionnaire from Wotif.com software architect, Greg Luck.
• Be the first to hear about hotel deals by subscribing to the Wotif.com Newsletter.

Posted at 07:40AM Feb 08, 2007 by Jamey Wood in eCommerce  |  Comments[3]

Peerflix: Hot DVD Exchange Site Trades .Net for GlassFish

Why rent when you can own? That's the question that Peerflix poses to potential users.

They are, of course, talking about their exchange program where anyone can buy and sell DVDs online with an overhead of "just $0.99 plus postal fees each time you receive a DVD." But in some sense, you could say the same philosophy extends to their site's infrastructure. Instead of essentially renting closed source software that you do not control, why not have an ownership-like stake with as much participation and control as you desire in an open source project?

So when Peerflix became unhappy with the instability of its previous .Net infrastructure, the company turned to its new CTO, Cyril Bouteille, and his ideas for starting fresh with a Java-based architecture. To select an application server for the heart of that architecture, Cyril and team "first narrowed down the space by cost, focusing mainly on open-source application servers." Next, they narrowed the list further by eliminating any candidates which did not provide both a full Java EE implementation and good commercial support options. At that point, Cyril says, "It basically came down to GlassFish and JBoss, and we felt GlassFish was ahead in terms of EE 5 compliance and architecture."

Six months later, Cyril's team of eight engineers completed a new implementation of the Peerflix site using the GlassFish v1 ur1 app server, Solaris 10 operating system, and some of Sun's shiny new x64 hardware. As Cyril notes, "We experienced a 360% increase in traffic after our launch as many of our quarter million registered users as well as new visitors came to check out our new site, and we have not experienced any unplanned downtime on our (4) Sun Fire X2100."

Wow. Congratulations to everyone at Peerflix for such a strong launch! We're excited that you selected GlassFish and other Sun technologies to play a part in your success story.

Want more info? Here are some additional resources:

• Peerflix's full response to the GlassFish adoption questionnaire.
• Peerflix's write up of what changed as part of their new launch.
• Sun's official customer success story for Peerflix.
Get the latest Peerflix news at their company blog.
• Interested in using Sun technologies to power your own Web 2.0 startup? The Sun Startup Essentials Program can provide discounts and other assistance.

Posted at 08:11AM Jan 08, 2007 by Jamey Wood in eCommerce  |  Comments[1]