Full GlassFish adoption questionnaire responses from GroovyBlogs.org's Glen Smith.

Date : February 2009

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

groovyblogs.org is a blog aggregator for the groovy and grails communities, and represents one of the most popular news portals for groovy and grails on the web. The application offers "popularity" views based on user click-through of available news, filtering of blog articles to groovy and grails-related content, aggregation of the groovy and grails mailing lists, as well as generating "hover-able" thumbnails for all articles hosted.

The application itself is built with Grails, and served as one of the earliest public Grails applications. The full source is downloadable, Apache2 licensed, and it remains a popular "tutorial" application for people wanting to learn Grails. The application aggregates nearly 200 hundred groovy related blogs, polling and and processing their RSS feeds every few hours. Recently the application has been enhanced to take advantage of a message-oriented architecture based on the embedded OpenMQ which ships with glassfish. This new architecture has led to significantly greater uptime, and much more scalable and pluggable deployment opportunities.

How and when did you first find out about GlassFish?

It was actually recommended to me via a client (most of my business is in Java EE consulting). I had already heard about GlassFish from the Java Posse, but had never downloaded it since I was already a happy Jetty user at home, and was typically committed to Websphere for the enterprise environment.

Did you go through an evaluation process before selecting GlassFish?

Jetty is a fantastic lightweight server, but as I began adding more virtual domains, things started to get more complex. There was a lot of XML editing going on, and pointy things hurt, so I was really looking for something that make the admin experience much less painful. GlassFish (then v1), was such a huge step up from an admin experience, I never looked back.

What specific version of GlassFish are you using?

9.1UR1

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

OSX. Yes same OS.

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

Intel iMac with 2Gb RAM. It's running GlassFish, a host of Grails applications, and the separate process responsible for generating the browser thumbnails and fetching feed urls. The thumbnail and feed service use OpenMQ as a bus for the request/response model from the Grails application.

Originally the site was hosted on an Ubuntu platform, but the PC evironment is so hot and noisy that when the existing server reached EOL, I replaced it with a whisper-quiet power-friently iMac. I'm definitely living the dream of OS independence. The dev environment is also OSX.

Have you purchased a GlassFish subscription?

Given that the site is open source, and not a source of revenue, there doesn't seem to be the need.

What specific features or modules of GlassFish are you using?

OpenMQ. JNDI data sources. Virtual servers.

Are you using OpenMQ?

Yes. We're using the version that ships with GlassFish, but running in it's own process.

What do you like most about GlassFish?

The admin console is fantastic. The only reason I revert to the commandline is for server restarts. The commitment to latest spec implementation is also incredible valuable in staying ahead of the curve.

What would you most like to see improved in GlassFish?

The upgrade process. I would track new versions much more closely if there was an easy way to migrate. Redefining virtual server configurations each time is a real pain.

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

Yes. Grails uses Spring/Hibernate under the covers and the server is hosting server Grails app (blogs, aggregator, forums).

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

Postgresql via GlassFish JNDI data sources.

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

The original development time for Groovyblogs was 20 hours during Feb 2007. It showcases how much you can accomplish in Grails in record time. The journey is documented on my blog if readers are interested. The current site has around 900 regular subscribers with daily hit counts significantly higher!

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

No. There were some initial issues related to PermGen stuff (particularly on application reinstalls), but these related more to Grails than to GlassFish. A few tweaks to -Xmx and we were in business.

How would your describe your participation in the GlassFish project?

user only.

Anything else you'd like to share about your use of GlassFish?

I'm just finishing the last edits on Grails in Action, and once the book it done, I'll be having a serious look at a Glassfish v3 upgrade.

Thank you Glen for sharing this with the rest of the GlassFish community!