Full GlassFish adoption questionnaire responses from Ipso-Facto's Grégory Cousin.
Date : November 2008
Can you tell us about the application, site, or service in which you have adopted GlassFish?
Ipso-Facto is an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) company developing solutions for the real estate market. For example, LogissimoASP is a CRM extranet used approximately 120 real estate agencies in France (each having one or more agent/user). This online service offers secure and reliable access to rents, prospects, and sales data right from any web browser. Another application using GlassFish is one that generates mailing content in PDF format. "Maisons Pierre" uses this later application.
In the many years of existence of the company, we've developed an expertise that is reported to fit really well the real estate agent day-to-day work while helping him save a lot of time. Of course, being an online service, we take care of backups and provide availability of the data and the service.
How and when did you first find out about GlassFish?
We heard about it approximately 2 years ago at the time of the launch of the specifications of Java EE 5. Most likely at the Sun Tech Days conference in Paris.
Did you go through an evaluation process before selecting GlassFish? If so, can you tell us a little bit about the process and results?
Our applications used to run in the Tomcat servlet container. For both functional requirements (such as to export XML) and technical ones (high availability, scalability), we started looking for another platform. We conducted performance and stability testing with GlassFish which scored reasonably good results for our requirements.
What specific version of GlassFish are you using?
Sun Application Server 9.1_02 (build B04-fcs).
On what operating system do you run GlassFish? Do you use the same OS for both development and production deployment?
Windows Server 2003 and, yes, same OS for development and production.
On what hardware platform do you run GlassFish? Do you use the same platform for both development and production deployment?
We use Dell Poweredge 1650/1850 for production and Poweredge 1425 for development.
What specific features or modules of GlassFish are you using?
Servlet and EJB 3 container, JDBC pooling, and Grizzly. Also Clustering, load-balancing to provide high availability to our users.
Have you purchased a GlassFish subscription?
Not yet, we're still in the budgeting phase.
What do you like most about GlassFish?
Support for the Java EE 5 platform, Open Source with a large community, Simplicity to deploy with Admin GUI.
What would you most like to see improved in GlassFish?
Are you using any open source or commercial frameworks or tools in your application?
Java Server Faces, Tomahawk, RichFaces, and Quartz.
Does your application use a database? If so, which one?
Yes, SQL Server 2005.
Are there any figures about the scale of your adoption which you would like to share?
Our production servers are clustered and use the loadbalancer. We handle about 500 concurrent users. Our application is complex (Convert Image, Generate PDF/RTF, Large SQL Requests...). We are pleased that GlassFish is working for us.
How has GlassFish performed since your application went live? Have you run into any production issues which you would attribute to GlassFish?
Last year, we faced some memory leaking in Grizzly. The solution was to use the "Catalina Web container option" workaround. This critical bug was resolved in the current release of GlassFish.
Is there anything else you think would be of interest in a story about your GlassFish adoption?
This application server reached maturity. We recommend this product for professional use.
Thanks Grégory for sharing this with the rest of the GlassFish community!