Full GlassFish adoption questionnaire responses from Gerald Gierer of Gieman IT Solutions.

Date : June 2008.

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

Gieman IT Solutions is running several sites on GlassFish including our own business sites (http://www.gieman.com and http://training.gieman.com) as well as several customer sites. One of these sites is for a large global customer and receives about 10-15k hits per day - usually spiking around specific times of the day depending on business. This site is used as am international communications portal to share information throughout the corporation and is only accessible through their intranet. All new projects developed and hosted by Gieman IT Solutions will be running on GlassFish and we recommend GlassFish to customers wishing to host their own application servers.

* How and when did you first find out about GlassFish?

I first read about GlassFish in a forum some time early 2007. I started learning more about GlassFish when we saw the need to replace Orion (our situation was very similar to the Wotif guys).

Orion had been in production use for one of our customers for over 6 years. It was a great application server - very fast and stable - but had reached end of life in terms of development and standards.

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

Yes but it was not as intensive as some would expect - in my opinion there were not too many options! The application server had to be well supported and well documented. It also had to have a great track record and be up to date in terms of the latest specifications. This was very important as we wanted to take advantage of the new features in the Java EE 5 specification including the latest JPA and JSF.

The server also had to be high quality, free for development purposes and (preferably) be open source. Oh yes - I also wanted an administration console that actually *worked* without the need for hacking xml and restarting the server for simple tasks. GlassFish was the only server that fitted all the criteria.

* What specific version of GlassFish are you using?

GlassFish V2 ur1 on both development and production

* Are you using OpenMQ?

No

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

Development: Windows XP, OpenSuse Linux 10.3 and Ubuntu 8
Production: OpenSuse Linux 10.3 and Novell Enterprise Suse

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

We have a variety of hardware platforms and use different development and production environments. Development machines have 2 or 3GB ram, production machines have between 1 and 8 CPUs with 4GB to 16GB RAM. From a GlassFish perspective we have not noticed any significant differences between these platforms.

* Have you purchased support for GlassFish? If not, have you though about doing so and do you know it includes access to patches and sustaining releases?

Not yet but it was one reason we decided on GlassFish - the support is there if we need it!

* What specific features or modules of GlassFish are you using?

We don't have need for many of the features at the moment. The core business of Gieman IT Solutions is web development so we are obviously using JSF. For our data access we are using JPA with TopLink (older systems still use Hibernate). The great thing about GlassFish is we have the ability to use other modules if required in the future.

* What do you like most about GlassFish?

Open source, strong backing from Sun, latest specs, easy configuration, great documentation, great community, great features.

* What would you most like to see improved in GlassFish?

There are still some glitches in configuration which are hard to pinpoint. I have had the web server stop responding when changing http service parameters. I have had similar problems when creating virtual hosts/listeners. A restart will always clean up the issues but it is still annoying. Startup times are also much slower than I would like - especially since we only use the web container. I understand this will improve with the new modular architecture of V3 but I have not yet had an opportunity to test.

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

We are big fans of Spring and Hibernate and have been using these for over 4 years. We also used Struts in the past but moved on to Spring MVC and now use JSF. The latest projects are using TopLink and JPA but only because they come bundled with GlassFish - otherwise we would still be using Hibernate. TopLink is really nice - and you don't need the large number of libraries that Hibernate relies on.

I am quickly becoming a convert to TopLink thanks to GlassFish! For development we are using Netbeans 6.1 which integrates extremely well with GlassFish.

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

We use both Oracle 10g and MySQL 5

* Are there any figures about the scale of your adoption which you would like to share (such as how much traffic is being handled, how many servers are used, how much developer time went into building your application)?

Most of our sites have relatively low traffic and run on single GlassFish instances. Development time for past projects could be anything between 2 and 24 man months.

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

Our first production release died within a few days due to a memory leak. It was not a very good start! We needed to restart the server every day until we installed, configured and tested the V2 UR1 release. We also had issues with performance but this was quickly fixed by tuning the http service request threads, file cache and keep alives. It may seem obvious but it is vitally important to understand and test performance before going live!

* How would your describe your participation in the GlassFish project?

A GlassFish user who reads and contributes to the forum if possible

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

We are very happy with GlassFish - keep up the good work!