Olivier Gerouville's photo Full GlassFish adoption questionnaire responses from developer Olivier Gerouville of  Banque Degroof Luxembourg.

Date : December 2007

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

We use GlassFish internally. I am one of three developers in our team. We are small teams and we cover the entire development process of our applications (analysis, programming, testing, deployment, AppServer administration, ...). The first projet is a customer database for our portfolio management department. Most of our in-house development from now on will be on the same platform (GlassFish, JSP pages using NetBeans, Web Services using Java CAPS). Web Services are used for transferring data from other applications so that they are available for the one running on top of GlassFish.

How and when did you first find out about GlassFish?

During a Sun presentation in September 2006 when we were deciding which platform we would start working with.

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

We prepared a scoring sheet with weighted points we felt were relevant for us. Then we had 3-day long presentations for each of the platform vendors that interested us. Based on our scoring total, we chose Sun. Then we did a "Proof Of Concept" sample application to validate our choice.

What specific version of GlassFish are you using?

Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 and soon moving to 9.1 ur1.

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

The application currently runs on Windows Server 2003, both development and production. As the number of deployed applications grows, we may migrate both environments to Solaris.

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

Intel dual-core servers with RAID disk arrays, same configuration for development and production. Again, as number of deployed applications grows, we may migrate to Sun V245 machines.

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

Yes, we have purchased support, production applications are fairly vital to our daily activities.

What do you like most about GlassFish?

Ease of use. Through the Admin console, it is easy to create and monitor Node Agents, server instances, deployed applications, ...

What would you most like to see improved in GlassFish?

We had problems with the JDBC drivers during development (although this may not be considered as part of the GlassFish project). The currently available version is also lacking some DB supported features that could be useful to us. For instance we cannot find an easy way to monitor users (users logged in, active sessions, time connected, http requests per user, ...) from the AppServer console. This may well be because this is our first development with GlassFish and we are not yet familiar with all its features. We also plan on adding the Sun Access Management module, which may help with this.

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

NetBeans 5.5.1, JConsole.

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

We use Sybase 12, we are currently migrating to Sybase 15.

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

One production server. One small application deployed: 50 users, usually between 5 and 10 concurrent logins. The application took one month to develop, test, and place in production (3-person team).

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

We did have a memory leak problem on our production machine, which turned out to be GlassFish bug 3683. System has been patched and is now back to normal.

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

It is good to work with products that have strong on-line communities, it does make our work easier (seeing what has been done before, finding people who ran in the same issues, ask questions, ...).


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