Full GlassFish adoption questionnaire responses from Nenad Novosel, Software Architect at Selmet.

Date : July 2008

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

Our Warehouse Management System (WMS) is based on a ruggedized Windows CE 5.0 terminal (Honeywell Dolphin 7600), GlassFish v2ur2 as the Web Service provider and JDBC Resource Pooling provider. WMS is tightly integrated with existing ERP installed on customer sites.

The Warehouse is covered with 802.11g signal so everything is fully done online. The Web Service part is developed using NetBeans 6.0.1, and the terminal part used VS2005 and C#. Our WMS product is now deployed in production with constantly new features being added. It is used for inventory and article checking, and has received a full customer approval. Receiving and sending goods directly to customers as well to other small warehouses, goods repositioning and other warehouse operations are now waiting customer rechecking and approval.

Out main goal was to have fast response time on the terminal side, using GlassFish we were able to achieve this. You can find out more about this our use of GlassFish in this case-study.

How and when did you first find out about GlassFish?

Even if we are a predominant Microsoft developer company (Microsoft is a big player in the PDA market), we are have been using Linux and FreeBDS for years now. I always keep track what's going on in a "Java" world. So I heard about GlassFish more than a year ago, and read reviews which where all saying that GlassFish is coming on strongly. At this time I had just done preliminary but succesful GlassFish testing which was enough to confirm that our approach was a good one.

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, we have done internal testing comparing GlassFish and IIS 5.0/6.0. We have also done some tests with Tomcat. We have done some performance and stability testing and found that response time was quite impressive, better than IIS 6.0. One simple observation, when you first call a Web Service instance running on IIS is a lag lasting a few seconds which. On the terminal side, this lag using GlassFish is almost invisible to users. We were very pleased with the result but also with the monitoring features for Web Services which are really helpful. But we are even more impressed with the monitoring of JDBC pools and connections. This is a great tool for checking connection status, so if any connection stays unclosed there is a way to find it! :)

What specific version of GlassFish are you using?

GlassFish V2 UR2

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

On the customer site we are running it on a separate server, based on Ubunut 8.04 Server TLS. Our develop environment is Ubuntu Desktop 7.10.

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

On customer site we have an HP PC, and in development we use an Acer PC.

What specific features or modules of GlassFish are you using?

We are using Metro (JAX-WS), JDBC Resources, and JDBC connection pooling.

Have you purchased a GlassFish subscription? If not, have you though about doing so and do you know it includes access to patches and sustaining releases (more details here)?

Until now, no we haven't. GlassFish is such a great product and has a tremendous community. However, we are a providing full and high quality service to our customers. We always try to get first level support directly from producer no matter if this is a hardware or software. So for sure, we would pay for quality support. Also, we have signed up to become a GlassFish partner.

What do you like most about GlassFish?

Speed, and monitoring capabilities.

What would you most like to see improved in GlassFish?

For now all functionality we need we can be found in GlassFish. However, it would be nice to have the same version in NetBeans during debug and in normal environment. For first-time users it can be a little bit tricky, because everything is working from within the IDE (easy WS development, creation of JDBC pools/connections), but when you start GlassFish as standalone, you have to configure it again (deploy application manually as well you have to configure JDBC pools again).

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

Yes, Postgresql 8.3.

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

Since we are using Web Services, we send/receive plain strings, so traffic is at minimal level. For now we have spent a man month in preparation, 2 man months in development phase, and a 2 man week in a deployment phase. The customer central site is using a dedicated server just to be safe. On this site we expect to have bigger traffic needs, and up to 10 portable terminals will are used which will concurrently do different WMS jobs. We expect up to 1000 request to server per terminal per day, but we can scale up to 5.000 on a busy day. For remote locations which already have SuSe with Postgresql, the customer installs GlassFish on those servers. These will use up to 5 terminals per site.

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

For now everything is running very smoothly.

How would your describe your participation in the GlassFish project (e.g. user only, submitter of bug reports and RFEs, developer who has contributed code)?

As user who reads and contributes to the forum if possible, as well as a submitter of bug reports and RFEs (whenever we find them :)

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

Great product.

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