Full GlassFish adoption questionaire responses from Cyril Bouteille, CTO of Peerflix.

Received December 27, 2006.

Can you tell us about the application, site, or service in which you have adopted GlassFish?
Over the past few months, Peerflix has been very busy rebuilding from scratch their web application enabling peer to peer trading of DVDs online. In addition from switching from ASP.NET to a more extensible and scalable platform running on GlassFish, a ton of changes have been made to the Peerflix web site itself based on the feedback from the Peerflix community. You'll notice lots of improvements but here are a few of the highlights:

• Money, Money, Money - We've converted the Peerbux credit system to trade cash. This means that when you send DVDs you'll earn trade cash. You can use this trade cash to receive DVDs from other members or once you have $100, you can cash out! Cha-ching!
• Express Yourself - We've built a number of new features to let our community interact with one another. Complete your profile, upload an avatar to personalize it, create a group to discuss your favorite flix or write a review to tell us what you really thought of Gigli!
• Better Trading - We've improved a number of components of our patented trading system to get you DVDs faster and more often. For example, we've changed the send process so that you now have a 24-hour exclusive opportunity to send a DVD that's requested. No more getting the 'Send' email only to be beaten out by another member (so long as you respond in the first 24 hours!)

How and when did you first find out about GlassFish?
I first heard about GlassFish @ JavaOne 2005. It was very exciting to hear that Sun would merge their different Java EE implementations into one, which they would make open-source.

Did you go through an evaluation process before selecting GlassFish? If so, can you tell us a little bit about the process and results?
Being a startup with limited cash, we first narrowed down the space by cost focusing mainly on open-source application servers. They have now reached a level of maturity allowing them to compete with commercial implementations. We then ruled out servers which were not full-fledged Java EE implementations, as we wanted to leverage EJB technology immediately and JMS later on. We also looked at production support services offered, which we saw as something important that the open-source community is not able to address at an enterprise-level for high-volume web sites. It basically came down to GlassFish and JBoss, and we felt GlassFish was ahead in terms of EE 5 compliance and architecture.

What specific version of GlassFish are you using?
V1 UR1

On what operating system do you run GlassFish? Do you use the same OS for both development and production deployment?
We run our new production website on Solaris 10, but most of our development workstations are Windows-based.

What specific features or modules of GlassFish are you using?
Servlet, JSP, JSF, EJB, JDBC pooling and LifecycleListener.

What do you like most about GlassFish?
We enjoyed the server's administration ease of use with the CLI tools, manually editable configuration files and NetBeans integration.

What would you most like to see improved in GlassFish?
Support.

Are you using any open source or commercial frameworks or tools in your application?
We currently use the Kodo JDO and Apache Shale frameworks.

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

Are there any figures about the scale of your adoption which you would like to share?
We experienced a 360% increase in traffic after our launch as many of our quarter million registered users as well as new visitors came to check out our new site, and we have not experienced any unplanned downtime on our (4) Sun Fire X2100.
A team of 8 engineers have been working on this new web application for the last 6 months.

How has GlassFish performed since your application went live?  Have you run into any production issues which you would attribute to GlassFish?
We went live with a few open issues, but they were mostly benign/noisy errors reported in the server log. We have been very satisfied with the stability of the server since we went live and have not encountered any significant reliability issues.

How would your describe your participation in the GlassFish project?
We played a strong role in reporting real-world deployment issues and assisting in producing patches, as well as filing RFEs based on needs from the front line, but we have not directly contributed code to date.

Is there anything else you think would be of interest in a story about your GlassFish adoption?
I can't think of anything else at this point.