GlassFish Adoption Questionnaire: Numera

Full GlassFish adoption questionnaire responses from architect Carlo Mossa of Numera.

Date : October 2007

You work for a company called Numera can you tell us more about it?

Numera Sistemi Informatica S.p.A is an IT company property of Banco di Sardegna - Bper Group (Gruppo Banca Popolare dell'Emilia Romagna). It offers many services to Bper Group Companies and to public and private companies also. The most important services are :

POS (Point of Sales), we are certified ISO 9001:2000
e-commerce (credit card transaction, virtual shops systems)
DTT (Digital Terrestrial Television) DVB-MHP (Digital Video Broadcasting, Multimedia Home Platform) applications
e-banking (web), phone-banking, sms-banking
Plastic cards
Fidelity/loyalty solutions (web/pos)
Web site solutions
e-learning
Finance/loan solutions (web)
ARGOS (touristic seaport managment system) (web/client server)
Call Center Applications (web,ivr,client server)

Numera is an ASP (Application Server Provider) too.

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

We use GlassFish for many web applications. The most important ones are the following :

The http://www.bpercard.it credit card holder site lets card holder see the balance and transactions for their credit card. The web application, running on Glassfish, retreives this information by calling thelegacy system (IBM Mainframe) using Web Services exposed by WebSphere 6.
The Numera Payment Gateway is a credit card system to carry out credit card transactions. Now we have a 133 companies that use this system and we have about 5000 transactions every day. Our most important customers are Tiscali (European Telecommunication Company), Meridiana, and EuroFly (Airline Companies).
The Western Union Application is a web application for the Bank branches. The steps are:

Bank employee sends a money transfer request using the web application to a Call Center and commits bank activites calling legacy Web Services
The system alerts the CallCenter for the incoming request (using a JMS queue and a Message-Driven EJB)
Call Center examines the request and if is ok send it to Western Union Net and mark the request as 'OK'
Bank Eemployee sees in his Activity Monitor the response and prints the receipt

The Call Center application is a web application integrated with IVR System and PHONEBAR. When a call arrives, the system shows a web page with the customer information and the services requested (Credit Card). The operator then works with the Credit Card Call Center Application to do one of the following: block the card, check balance and transactions, change information about the card holder, .... all calling Web Service methods.

How and when did you first find out about GlassFish?

I found out about GlassFish in a Sun Training Course (SL-500) in Rome.

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

I've gone through an evaluation process between JBOSS and Glassfish, but my primary goal was use JEE 5 and JBOSS support wasn't good.

What specific version of GlassFish are you using?

v2 beta 2 and we are now migrating to v2 final release (see answer to last question).

On what operating system do you run GlassFish? What hardware platform do you run GlassFish?

We run on Windows 2000 server. Production servers are two Xeon with 6 processors each.

What specific features or modules of GlassFish are you using?

We mainly use :

Web application container
Web Services to communicate with .Net (Metro)
Persistence (JPA)

What do you like most about GlassFish?

Performance.

What would you most like to see improved in GlassFish?

Performance, the admin gui, and the update center.

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

Yes, we're using Dynafaces.

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

Microsoft Sql Server 2000/2005.

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

I don't have this information now.

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

Perfectly without any issue.

How would your describe your participation in the GlassFish project?

As a user only.

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

There doesn't seem to be an official way of upgrading from GlassFish v2 beta2 to v2 final relase. I've found an upgrade path to migrate. Here it is:

Copy in a different location <domain1>/* directory and sub directory
Uninstall v2 beta2
Install v2 final relase with the same user and password and port
Start and stop glassfish
Replace domain.xml with the old one
Copy all from <copy of domain1>/j2ee-apps to <domain1>/j2ee-apps
Copy all from <copy of domain1>/j2ee-modules to <domain1>/j2ee-modules
Copy all from <copy of domain1>/generated to <domain1>/generated
Start glassfish

It may not migrate everything over (like EJB timers) but it worked for me!

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