ESPN at GlassFish Community Event, JavaOne 2011

1. GlassFish Community Event – Customer Presenting with
Experiences
Sean Comerford, Site Architect
ESPN.com
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2. Glassfish at ESPN
• ESPN historically built on an entirely proprietary Java
stack
– Hundreds of applications running in a custom built servlet 2.2 container
– Custom built frameworks for persistence, messaging, just about everything else
– These frameworks were built out of necessity 8-10 years ago
• Glassfish offered us solutions we don’t have to
maintain / enhance ourselves AND
better performance & scalability.
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3. Glassfish at ESPN specifics
• Migrating all of our applications to Glassfish
– Running 3000+ requests / second personalization service, MLB, etc
– Standardizing on:
• MDBs for messaging
• EJBs to expose application business logic both locally and remotely
• Container managed resources for config management
• JPA for persistence
• Converting to GF 3.1.x very soon
– Eager to use latest CDI, JPA, JAX-RS
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4. What Worked
• Grizzly rocks – NIO provided greatly enhanced scalability
– Our app latency was similar / same but anywhere from 2-5X more concurrent users
vs our proprietary solution
– Our testing indicated this was also significantly better than Tomcat, IBM, JBoss
• We love having “one stop shopping” to best of breed tech in EE
• JAX-RS will greatly simplify developer APIs which is
company priority
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5. How Can Glassfish Be Better
• Unfortunately we run on Windoze…. and Glassfish support for running
as a Windows service leaves much to be desired
• Configuration management is a huge pain point for us – tons of
services talking to tons of DBs and multiple backend systems for
content, registration / authentication
– We joke that we’re config engineers instead of Java engineers
• Community and Glassfish team support has been great but
questions around Oracle’s official support model
• Very Interested to hear about the plans around Java EE 7
& cloud
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