Full GlassFish adoption questionnaire responses from Guillaume Bilodeau.
Date : May 2007
Can you tell us about the application, site, or service in which you have adopted GlassFish?
GlassFish is the hosting application server for two intranet applications used within Auchan Russia,
a division of a France-based world-wide retail store chain. These
applications enable the shared and controlled management of internal
collections and promotional activities. Both applications are
being used by thousands of users spread over several time zones.
How and when did you first find out about GlassFish?
I first learned about GlassFish on the java.net web site in early 2005.
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 needed to migrate from an older application server (OC4J) that
was blocking the use of newer XML parsers and consequently the adoption
of technologies such as Spring. The main requirements were that
the new application server:
We evaluated 3 open-source offerings: JBoss 4.0.5, Geronimo 1.1 and
GlassFish v1 in the form of Sun Java Application Server 9.0.
Because of the applications' reliance on EJBs, it was decided to not
evaluate Tomcat and Jetty.
JBoss was quickly eliminated because of its lack of a simple management
interface. We also ended up rejecting Geronimo after spending too
much time trying to write proprietary deployment descriptors and
dealing with classloader issues.
GlassFish impressed us from the beginning, particularly because of its
intuitive web-based management interface. Deploying the existing
applications was painless, requiring us only to write simple deployment
descriptors; we did not meet any classloading issues.
What specific version of GlassFish are you using?
GlassFish v1, in the form of Sun Java Application Server 9.0, update 1.
On what operating system do you run GlassFish? Do
you use the same OS for both development and production
deployment?
The production instance of GlassFish was running on Windows 2000 Server. Development was done on Windows XP.
On what hardware platform do you run GlassFish? Do you use the
same platform for both development and production deployment?
The production server is Intel Xeon-based. Development was done on Intel Pentium IV workstations.
Have you purchased support for GlassFish? If not, have you though about doing so?
Commercial supported was not purchased. Such a purchase was not
on the radar at the time: operation and maintenance of the server was
easy and support from the mailing list was quick and conclusive.
What specific features or modules of GlassFish are
you using?
In no particular order: web container, EJB container, management console, JDBC datasources, application logging, monitoring.
What do you like most about GlassFish?
What would you most like to see improved in
GlassFish?
Are you using any open source or commercial
frameworks or tools in your application?
Yes, many.
Does your application use a database? If so, which one?
Yes, Oracle 9i 9.2.
Are there any figures about the scale of your adoption which you would like to share?
This is no eBay! As I wrote before, our GlassFish instance is running two applications which are being used by a few thousands users over several time zones. We get peaks of 300 simultaneous users, and this is bound to grow exponentially in the next couple of years.How has GlassFish performed since your application went live? Have you run into any production issues which you would attribute to GlassFish?
GlassFish has been running without a hitch since we started using it
in production. We did encounter some problems along the way where
we suspected that GlassFish might the cause (mostly because we had just
switched from a different application server) but debugging always
showed the cause to be one of our applications.
How
would your describe your participation in the GlassFish project?
I have not contributed to the project.
Is there anything else you think would be of interest in a story about your GlassFish adoption?
We did get a lot of skeptical "What app server is this?" and "Really, nobody uses that!" upon making the switch to GlassFish. With the success of our adoption, I think we can safely assume that these people will consider GlassFish when they will be faced with the same choice.