Full GlassFish adoption questionnaire responses from Norbert Seekircher, Lead Software Architect at Bauer Systems.

Date : September 2008

Can you tell us about the application, site, or service in which you have adopted GlassFish?

At Bauer Systems (http://www.bauersystems.de) we are using GlassFish as the container for all our current Java EE development. Although at this time we only have small applications running on top of GlassFish in production, larger applications are in development and will later be using GlassFish as production environment as well. These applications deal with media production (print and online) and will be used by hundreds of users.

How and when did you first find out about GlassFish?

I think I first read about GlassFish several years ago and took a closer look when clustering support was announced which must have been about two years ago.

Did you go through an evaluation process before selecting GlassFish? If so, can you tell us a little bit about the process and results?

We used another open source app server so the evaluation was basically a comparison between those two. Despite the other server works reliably and has some nice features, GlassFish convinced us by providing a transparent roadmap, Java EE 5 support, a good administration frontend, great tooling in NetBeans and is, last but not least, well documented.

What specific version of GlassFish are you using?

GlassFish V2 Update Release 2

On what operating system do you run GlassFish? Do you use the same OS for both development and production deployment?

In development we use Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. Our production system is hosted on Linux.

On what hardware platform do you run GlassFish? Do you use the same platform for both development and production deployment?

Development uses PCs and Macs, production uses PCs

What specific features or modules of GlassFish are you using?

EJB (including WebServices), WebApplications, JMS, and starting to playing around with JBI.

Are you using OpenMQ?

Yes, we use the default GlassFish JMS implementation.

Have you purchased a GlassFish subscription? If not, have you though about doing so and do you know it includes access to patches and sustaining releases (more details here)?

We just asked a sun representative for an offer!

What do you like most about GlassFish?

Apart from it's logo? It's not easy to break that down into one single favorite. I like the ease-of-use in conjunction with NetBeans, the help from the vivid community and the ideas from the development team (like those targeted for the next release).

What would you most like to see improved in GlassFish?

Implementing SCA into GlassFish would be a great feature!

Are you using any open source or commercial frameworks or tools in your application?

We are strongly relying on Hibernate/JPA.

Does your application use a database? If so, which one?

Most of our applications use an Oracle database, but we also have JavaDB for some smaller apps.

Are there any figures about the scale of your adoption which you would like to share?

The largest of our applications being currently developed on top of GlassFish has a development effort of roughly 20 person years.

How has GlassFish performed since your application went live? Have you run into any production issues which you would attribute to GlassFish?

At the moment we only have small GlassFish applications in production, the larger ones are in development. With the small ones everything is fine.

How would your describe your participation in the GlassFish project (e.g. user only, submitter of bug reports and RFEs, developer who has contributed code)?

We are mainly users. From time to time we have submitted bug reports and RFEs to Daniel Adelhardt from Sun.

Is there anything else you think would be of interest in a story about your GlassFish adoption?

We love your T-Shirts!

Thanks Norbet for sharing this with the rest of the GlassFish community!