Full GlassFish adoption questionnaire responses from Rakuten's engineering lead, whose name we cannot share unfortunately.

Date : January 2009

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

Our company Rakuten (Japan's largest online shopping mall) is providing various services that center on E-Commerce. These services are comprised of thousands of servers, and application servers are different for each service. We selected GlassFish for one of those services.

How and when did you first find out about GlassFish?

We got the news from our in-house JAVA special staff that Sun had released a new JAVA application server.

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

The first thing that we consider is the behavior upon failure. Our service is E-Commerce, and great availability is expected. Therefore, this is a very important caracteristic. For example, any outage should not be perceived by service users. We verified that the session of one instance is successfuly replicated to other instance with a cluster configuration (as advertised), the behavior of the server under constant load for two weeks or more, but also how an existing instance is recognized when the domain is restarted, and so on.

What specific version of GlassFish are you using?

glassfish-v2ur1-b09d (I'll upgrade as soon as possible:-< )

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

We use:
Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 for developing,
Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 4 for staging.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 4 for production.

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

All hardware are IA servers.

Have you purchased a GlassFish subscription?

Yes, I know about the subscription. Our in-house JAVA special staff is working on it.

What specific features or modules of GlassFish are you using?

We always use the Admin console interface for deploying or confirming the configuration, and we are planning to develop the monitoring function with Mbeans that is built into GlassFish.

Are you using OpenMQ?

No we don't use it.

What do you like most about GlassFish?

There are certain things Tomcat just can't do, and WebLogic can sometimes be overkill. What we like about GlassFish is that even though there's still room for improvements, it strikes a nice middle ground.

What would you most like to see improved in GlassFish?

We'd like to be able to deploy jar files and replace uncompressed files without stopping the cluster or the instance (full rolling-upgrades). Also, when a new user comes in, we'd like GlassFish to redirect to an instances that has the most appropriate capabilities. Finally, it would be nice that when errors occur for the admin console to display the reference URL in the same window (sounds like an easy and realistic idea?)

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

Struts, iBatis, Spring, NetBeans, Apache with mod_proxy_balancer.

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

Yes, we use MySQL5.

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

Our use of GlassFish so far is probably small compared to your other stories, and unfortunately we are not allowed to share the technical details for competitive reasons. But on the topic of scalability, we are really interested in finding out how much traffic can be handled by how many servers, or how large-scale deployments configure clusters, servers, and thread-pools. We could also use more help on how to monitor a large number of GlassFish servers.

We hope to have this information readily available, so that we can grow our adoption of GlassFish.

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

We are satisfied with this application. However, the evaluation of the truth for GlassFish will be shown in the future as we've just started an analysis of our operations.

How would your describe your participation in the GlassFish project?

Our team members are users, and one of them is our technical observer and reporter of bugs. He is an active member of the GlassFish Mailing List.

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

I hope it evolves fast and fast, and become good and good!

Thank you for sharing this with the rest of the GlassFish community!