Full GlassFish adoption questionaire responses from Greg Luck, Software Architect at Wotif.com.

Received January 26, 2007.

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

We are running wotif.com on Glassfish. Wotif.com is the leading accommodation booking service in Australia and New Zealand and one of Australia's busiest e-commerce sites.

We run an instance of Glassfish on multiple Sun40Z servers which serve up the bulk of the site, and run our supplier and administration applications.
 
We are also planning new applications to run on Glassfish.

How and when did you first find out about GlassFish?

I heard about it a few years ago. Probab y in discussion with colleagues.

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

Yes. We have been on Orion which is a fast and stable application server. The IronFlare guys have not actively developed Orion for several years. It is stuck on J2EE1.3.

We were very keen to do a couple of things:

1. Get on a supported and current platform with a future.
2. Take advantage of new features in the Java EE 5 specification and things built on top of it.

Wotif.com is on record as being a big user of open source. We wanted either an open source application server or an inexpensive one. That way we can scale out our operations without being crippled by licensing costs.

In mid 2006 those criteria pretty much left the following open source application servers (plus a few commercial ones):

1. JBoss. I used this app server and put in production in 2005 while consulting in the US. I got reasonably good results with it. The RedHat acquisition of JBoss meant we would be dealing with our Linux vendor, which was a plus. Unfortunately for JBoss, the infamous serverside astro turfing controversy and other similar ones left a bad taste in the mouths of several of our people. We decided to not go to JBoss in the fist instance.
2. Geronimo. I know and like the guys behind this project. I am still not sure it is ready for production environments of our size and complexity.
3. Glassfish. We did not know too much bout Glassfish. So we created some spike stories and tested it. A partial test port went smoothly and it passed our exacting performance and stability testing suite. We have a strong relationship with Sun and liked dealing with them. We trusted Sun would stand behind Glassfish. We were also keen on buying additional support and training services from Sun, which we knew were available. Finally being the reference implementation of JEE, we knew that we would get quick access to new specs and revisions of existing ones.

What specific version of GlassFish are you using?

Sun Application Server 9, UR1 with the Catalina web container option. -Dcom.sun.enterprise.web.connector.useCoyoteConnector=true

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

RedHat AS3. In development we run Glassfish on various 2.6 kernel versions of Linux from Fedora Core 6, Ubuntu and also Mac OS X. Interestingly, the permgen memory leak on redeploys does not seem to affect the Mac Java version.

What specific features or modules of GlassFish are you using?

Pretty much everything, except Grizzly. We have a complex application.

What do you like most about GlassFish?

Open source, high quality, latest specs.

What would you most like to see improved in GlassFish?

We have raised around 10 bugs on Glassfish. We would like to see those done.

Some particular annoyances:

1. The PermGen memory leak on redeploy. Developers have to restart after about 10 deploys.
2. The guide to configuring domain.xml is very patchy. It is a lot of trial and error to tune your app. We need a tuning guide. I have already suggested this to Jeanfrancois.
3. The QuickStart feature is very buggy. We turned it off to resolve a whole host of bugs we had. We suggest it is turned off by default until it is fixed.
4. We are buying support. The Sun App 9 does not feature the ant based installer, which we need. So we use Sun App 9 and add the Glassfish ant installer to it. It would be much better for us if Sun could simply support the official Glassfish releases, so we do not need to bother with Sun App 9.

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

We use Hibernate, some Struts, some Spring. We are big users of ehcache and use its distributed caching features.

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

Oracle 10G.

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

The port took a team of 6 about a month. We had been on Orion so long that some Orionisms crept into the code base. We also encountered bugs. One frustrating thing was there was a useful Orion shortcut for testing where your encode a username and password in a get request and it would authenticate you. Sadly that is not in the spec and Glassfish does not implement it. This caused our web test suite time to blow out substantially.

Our production servers support around 10,000 concurrent sessions. Wotif.com is a very busy e-commerce site. We are pleased that Glassfish is working for us.

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

How would your describe your participation in the GlassFish project?

We have logged around 10 very detailed bug reports and have had email exchanged with Sun engineers such as Jeanfrancois Arcand to suggest improvements.

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

We hope to encourage others to join the Glassfish community. Having completed our migration and created bugs along the way which are being addressed, this will make it easier for others.