GlassFish Adoption Questionnaire response from MidwifeMate by Yonas Jongkind.
Date: Feb 2009

Can you tell us about the application, site, or service in which you have adopted GlassFish?
During the process of becoming a father I learned about midwives. There are not many of them, but they are doing amazing work to support Mothers during a enormous period in their life.

Our application focuses on tracking the information related to the medical records and billing. We have some simple features that save midwives a lot of time, like faxing reports directly within the application to hospitals and doctors, and quality of service enhancing features like checklists that validate their state against the medical (Antenatal) records.

http://www.midwifemate.com/

How and when did you first find out about GlassFish?
I first found out about GlassFish as Make Technologies. Make is a Java shop that migrates Legacy (read COBOL) systems to Java. We were doing some pretty cool things around using computer based analysis to ease the migration of business rules to the new system.

To support our Business Analysis we created a dynamic web application which we created using facelets on faces on JEE.

Did you go through an evaluation process before selecting GlassFish?
We used the Oracle, JBoss and GlassFish servers. JBoss is very attractive to the old unix hacker in me as it's mainly about editing config files. However we had some issues around JEE features not working quite as expected, which GlassFish did better.

Our main barrier to GlassFish was the fact that it meant using toplink and our preference has been hibernate due to it's enhanced query language, flexibility and better error reporting.

Once we figured out how to run hibernate in glassfish by adding it to our EAR rather than to the glassfish lib directory (hellish jar compatibility issues) we were off to the races with Hibernate and Glassfish.

What specific version of GlassFish are you using?
2.2UR2

On what operating system do you run GlassFish ?
We develop on Mac and Windows and deploy on RedHat Linux.

On what hardware platform do you run GlassFish?
We are using all Multi-core Intel/AMD CPU's on dev and prod. However the OS's and environments are quite different.

We looked into clouds, but at the end of the day we had a business requirement for our servers to be inside Canada rather than the US. So we found a good vendor that talked a lot about privacy and security for our medical records and went with them. So all the prod/stage is on vanilla physical linux servers.

Have you purchased a GlassFish subscription?
I have never purchased a GlassFish subscription.

What specific features or modules of GlassFish are you using?
JEE/JPA, JSF/Facelets, Servlets, EJB Timers, EJB's.

We considered using GlassFish's JNLP support, but ended up just using the default JNLP servlet.

Are you using OpenMQ?
No. Though we might be using message queuing in our application down the road.

What do you like most about GlassFish?
Good support for JEE. Works well on multiple platforms.

I also really like the new GlassFish Eclipse plugin. The one that introduced the glassfish log viewer as seperate from the default console.

What would you most like to see improved in GlassFish?
Either make it run as a windows service, including a tool to view the console message. Or run it from the command line. The 1/2 way tray icon is goofy (it lets you start/stop glass fish, but can't tell me it it's running or show me the console).

The old perm gen is also annoying, but apparently unsolvable.

Are you using any open source or commercial frameworks or tools in your application?
Also note, we run our glassfish behind an Apache web server using proxy_ajp. Which does not seem to be that well supported.
 
Does your application use a database?
MySQL (server) and h2 (client).

Are there any figures about the scale of your adoption which you would like to share ?
Nothing exciting here, about 2000 hours of developer time. One beefy server. About 2-5 requests per second.

How has GlassFish performed since your application went live?
We have been nailed by the perm gen space issue after an update. Now we always restart the server. We also had an error where we ran out of memory and had to increase the amount of memory the server uses.

How would your describe your participation in the GlassFish project ?
I am just a user of glassfish. Though I have submitted some bug reports to related and sub projects.


Thanks Yonas for taking time to fill up the qustionnaire!