GlassFish Adoption Questionnaire: OKAir

Full GlassFish adoption questionnaire responses from architect Ota Kadlec of OK-air.

Date : November 2007

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

We have developed Airport Information System (AIS), which is used for various scenarios from flight coordination to aircraft handling. This system, which is deployed at Karlovy Vary International Airport, runs on GlassFish. Our mission was to develop complex system, which includes: receiving data from different sources like SITATEX or Air Traffic Control (ATC), manage and deliver them to airport staff or passengers. Main modules of the AIS are:

Flight coordination system, which is used for timetable coordination and communication with airlines according to IATA standards
FIDS (Flight Information Display System) for displaying information about arrivals and departures in terminal
Aircraft Movement Management System for actual flights. It includes connection with air traffic control through JMS and FMTP
Handling system to charge for provided services connected with airport ERP system
Statistics for airport management and mandatory statistics for ICAO, ACI and EUROSTAT organizations

How and when did you first find out about GlassFish?

I found GlassFish at the end of 2005 at Sun website.

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 at first we were choosing between J2EE and Java EE 5. Whereas one of the main criteria was ease of development, we chose Java EE 5. We evaluated JBoss and GlassFish, but at this time JBoss didn’t have full support of Java EE 5. And another important thing was configuration and administration. I had a lot of problems with configuring JBoss to work as I wanted. On the other hand the admin GUI in GlassFish works perfectly.

What specific version of GlassFish are you using?

GlassFish V2 b58g-fcs

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

Our production system is running on SuSE Linux and our development machines use Windows XP and Mandriva Linux

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

For production server we use dual Xeon box and for development we use P4 and Core2duo workstations and notebooks.

Have you purchased support for GlassFish? If not, have you though about doing so?

No. Nowadays we use only community support that is sufficient for us. If our company grows and if we deploy our system on more airports we will consider it.

What specific features or modules of GlassFish are you using?

EJB3, JPA, Web Services, JNDI, JSP, JSF, Servlets, JMS, JavaMail API, Connection pooling, JDBC, Message Queue C API

Can you give us more details on the use of the MQ's C API ?

Yes. For communication with ATC (Air Traffic Control) we have to use special FMTP (Flight Message Transfer Protocol) communication protocol defined by EUROCONTROL. So, on our server is running Sun Java System Message Queue, where we have two queues. One for incoming messages from ATC and one for outgoing messages to ATC. These queues are connected with application for communication with ATC, which runs on Windows computer. This application is able to communicate through FMTP and uses one queue for storing messages from ATC (producer) and one queue for sending to ATC (consumer). Because of this application is written in C++ and runs on Windows we have to use MQ C-API for connecting to these queues. Our system uses Message Driven Bean for listening on incoming queue. Then messages from the queue are processed by the system.

Thanks, what about Web Services ?

We use Web Services for access to timetables and information about actual traffic from the airport web server. It's PHP to Java connection, because the web server uses PHP as the scripting language. Output from web services can be seen on airport website: http://www.airport-k-vary.cz/

What do you like most about GlassFish?

Ease of use, good performance, Admin GUI, integration with the NetBeans IDE.

What would you most like to see improved in GlassFish?

Exception handling, debug performance (especially debug server startup).

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

We use Apache Jakarta and Apache Tomahawk JSF components.

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

Yes, MySQL 5.0 and Firebird.

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

This system is used primarily by the staff of the airport plus some Internet users which search in timetables on the airport webserver which retrieve data through web services. So there are no more than 50 concurrent users.

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

We haven’t noticed any problem with GlassFish in production. Of course, we have had some problems, but they were caused by wrongly configured system (some resources and connections).

How would your describe your participation in the GlassFish project ?

User only.

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

Many people asked me why we use this “cutting edge” technology. Some said that GlassFish is not-production ready. When we started our development I was little doubtful too, but after our first experiences with GlassFish, we have changed our point of view. So, just try it!

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