Full GlassFish adoption questionaire responses from Johan Vos of DaliCMS.

Date : January 2007

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

LodgON's DaliCMS Web 2.0 ready Content Management System is developed using Java EE technologies. DaliCMS is a Web Content Management System that combines the traditional CMS features with typical Web 2.0 modules. More information about DaliCMS (including screenshots) can be found at http://dalicms.lodgon.com.

With DaliCMS, LodgON provides a tool for customers that want a complete and easy to use Content Management System, and that also want to use (or plan to use) some of the new Web 2.0 things like Flickr integration, Google Maps, or external blogs. In our case, the customer only pays for the DaliCMS modules he needs. This allows the customer to start with a basic package, and grow their use of the product to add more modules as needed. This enables pay-per-use for modules such as the integrated forum, mailing lists, GoogleMap integration, etc.

LodgON provides its services as a hosted solution, but customers can install DaliCMS on their own servers as well. Pricing starts around 1000$. LodgON has partnerships with companies in the graphical and marketing sector, and collaborates with them to deliver high-quality websites.

How and when did you first find out about GlassFish? 

At the JavaOne conference in 2005, when GlassFish was announced. I downloaded the first released code immediately after the announcement, and started looking at the code the same night.

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

With DaliCMS, LodgON wanted not only to deliver a traditional CMS, but also a system that is ready to support the current and future requests of users. There is a clear trend towards systems that can integrate content and functionality from third parties (e.g. external blogs, Google Maps,...). Two very important requirements for successful Web 2.0 modules are standard-based (e.g. use of RSS) and advanced technologies (e.g. Ajax).

We needed an Application Server with the same characteristics: it had to be based on a widely accepted standard (Java EE), and still very advanced (e.g. the first implementation of EJB 3.0). Being able to browse to the source code in order to better understand the behaviour, or to detect problems, was a big plus.

What specific version of GlassFish are you using? 

For production code, we use V1UR1. For development, we mainly use v2 or a build using the latest cvs code 

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

Our development and production servers are running Linux. GlassFish runs on the laptops and desktops of LodgON employees, mainly Dell systems with Linux/Windows dual boot. We currently don't run GlassFish on the windows partitions. GlassFish also runs on our servers, which are mainly dual core Intel processors with Fedora. We recently installed GlassFish on a Linux/AMD machine.

Have you though about buying support for GlassFish?

We haven't bought support since we are pretty deep into the GlassFish code ourselves. If we encounter a problem, we debug the GlassFish code and the DaliCMS code together, in order to isolate the problem and to fix it. However, I would recommend GlassFish users that are not deep in the code to ask their questions on the forums, or better yet to buy support.

What specific features or modules of GlassFish are you using?

We are using the following modules: EJB, CMP, JavaMail, Java Persistence API, Webtier (Grizzly, JSP and Servlet).

The web-based administration tool of DaliCMS is written in Ajax, using the Google Web Toolkit. Using servlet technologies, this administration tool connects with the backend of the CMS which is written entirely using Java EE technologies.

What do you like most about GlassFish?

The source code is available. If something doesn't work the way we assume it to work, we can check the source code to better understand what is happening.

What would you most like to see improved in GlassFish?

Faster deploy (although this has improved a lot since v2).

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

We use the Lucene search engine and the tinyMCE editor. For developing the templates for the front-end, we use the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and Adobe's Flex in case the website has to be really dynamic and interactive.

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

Since we use the Java Persistence API (JPA), we are not tied to a specific database. In almost all cases, however, we use the MySQL database.

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

We had some problems in the very beginning with multiple virtual servers listening on the same physical host but at different IP addresses. We were able to find the cause of this problem by checking the source code, and reported it to the development team. It got solved soon after.

How would your describe your participation in the GlassFish project?

See above.

Thanks for sharing your experiences, Johan!