Success Stories

ATSi is an import/export software development company in the U.S. whose legacy software suite comprises all aspects of freight transport including air and ocean booking and forwarding (export), Customs management and distribution (import), wharehousing and delivery, shipment tracking and more. We (ATSi) also provide network and system management services for several of our key clients. We are currently using JOnAS internally for a couple information portals (typical "web applications"):

• a customer information and contact manager, called 'Contaxx'; and
• a system and network asset tracker, called 'Networx'.

We also have a couple of "public" applications nearing completion and which we expect to be fully deployed by mid-2005:

• an issue tracking system, called 'CaseTrax', which will replace our current legacy "CASE" system and provide our customers with the ability to directly track and collaborate on their issues over the Web; and
• a Customs clearance tracking and EDI communication system, called 'ACEx' ("ACE", or "Automated Commercial Environment", is a new e-commerce program from U.S. Customs for handling electronic filing of clearance documents for import and export; this system is replacing an older system as part of Customs' modernization efforts).

Of the preceding two, we are most excited about 'ACEx' which we will be offering to our customers as both a packaged application ("bundled" with JOnAS), and as a web-service hosted by us. This application represents our first use of the WebServices service in JOnAS.

Cotranet, a company based in Meylan ZIRST (close to Grenoble, France), develops and sells an Intranet / Extranet system called the COTRANET solution. The COTRANET solution is a collaborative knowledge management environment based on Open Source software. It proposes a set of tools (EDMS, Forums, Directory, Calendars, Workflow,....) to support collaborative work among communities of people. The COTRANET solution is currently used by thousands of users both in public and private areas. The system is provided as a service through ASP or as a product through licences. When moving to the J2EE technology in 2001, Cotranet naturally looked at Open Source solutions. Cotranet experimented JOnAS 2.4 : the tool was easy to install and to test. Cotranet designed a new architecture on top of the J2EE technology and has developed add-ons to allow the integration of non Java tools in the product architecture. JOnAS has been used since summer 2002 as the cornerstone of the J2EE environment. JOnAS currently equips all the Cotranet development and production platforms. Cotranet also delivers JOnAS to clients who have chosen to host their own COTRANET solution. Cotranet has been running JOnAS on Solaris and Linux platforms for about two years and is very satisfied with its performances and robustness.

The goal of EMM Service GmbH is to design, develop and operate innovative enterprise e-commerce solutions for small and middle-sized companies. High quality and small costs are expected in this sector. To live up to expectations, our technical base is open source software. JOnAS is our favourite Application server because it is very stable, fast, specification compliant and has a big and professional community. On the marketplace www.elektromotorenmarkt.de we are using JOnAS servers as EJB environment, persistence layer, e-Shop solution and interface to a heavy industry backend system.

Joe Weder, Intelligent Computer Systems Inc. said: "At Intelligent Computer Systems we are currently developing our next generation enterprise business system for wholesalers and distributors of consumer packaged goods. Written completely in Java, N-e-ware (TM) is a 3-tier system that requires a high performance J2EE application server... JOnAS is perfect for our needs. It is fast and spec compliant. It does what I want in a reasonable footprint (try loading WebSphere on a notebook class machine... any machine for that matter), we think it runs as fast as Weblogic and WebSphere if not faster, for $10k - 30k less. I cannot tell you what this is going to do to our margins. Your problem is that you are the best kept secret in the market. I think there is absolutely no reason why JOnAS could not be one of the top contenders in the app-server market. Guess lots of people still think you gotta pay big bucks for IT software... not me ;) Keep up the good work."

Dominique Morvan, Manager, Ingenosya France said: "With JONAS 2.4, we have found the best foundation for efficient software solution development. It allows our customers, both major accounts and SOHO accounts, to afford the new J2EE technology and its benefits at a reasonable cost. Moreover, as a software house, we have noted JONAS 2.4 to be much faster to take in hand than the commercial platforms helping us to train many new skilled J2EE developers."

Kovair was selected by Computerworld as a Top 100 Emerging Company in 2001. It was given the "Best Product Award" by Customer Interactions Solutions magazine. Kovair's overall site has to support a large number of clients. "Pages are spun off in multiple formats, both HTML and WML [Wireless Markup Language]," said Kumar Goswami, president and CTO at Kovair Software Inc., San Jose, "so it is important that logic levels be maintained separately and perform robustly". Kovair.com also deploys its system at dedicated data centers. "We're running multiple companies. It has to be highly available. It has to be up 24x7". Central to all of this is a great deal of business logic software, feeding or being fed by a data software layer. "We have EJB servers, that we associate with a farm of Oracle databases," said Goswami. For this implementation, Kovair turned to Evidian (subsidiary of Bull) and its JOnAS EJB server. "We evaluated several servers and liked what Evidian had to offer. We felt comfortable that Evidian's approach was an open source approach," said Goswami. "All the app servers were in early phases, and we were concerned about bugs. We felt that with open source software, if we had to, we could address problems ourselves. We didn't have to, but the comfort was great."

LBS logics offers consulting and it-solutions for corporate mobile business processes. LBS logics' standard software "Integrated Mobile Solution (IMS)" acts as central intelligence and information portal for field workers, decision makers and business partners. IMS allows management and administration staff to perform detailed analysis of mobility costs and mobile processes from overview down to per-cost-record view, supported through integrated reporting, calculated key figures and easy-to-use cost-controlling features. Through integration of electronical mobile devices (smartphones, pda's) and location based services (LBS), the field workers are being fully integrated into corporate IT processes. Previously post-mobile handled tasks are performed with IMS in real-time. State-of-the-art planning tools supported by geographical information systems (GIS) are enabling optimal ressource and time-planning. LBS logics is using JOnAS for its standard software solution "Integrated Mobile Solution". IMS is a J2EE application currently running on JOnAS 4.5.3, there are about 45 CMP EJB's (with strong CMR usage) and 19 SLSB's. The system is continuously growing as it is permanently enhanced and developed. In addition to the 45 CMP EJB's which are representing "business objects", Hibernate 2.1 is used in parallel for about 31 "helper" persistent objects. The main development tools are eclipse, ant, and XDoclet. On the production server jonas runs on a gentoo linux box and the Sun 1.5.xx JVM in combination with mysql 4.1 as RDBMS.

NeoSavant's flagship product CyclePro has been developed and launched using JOnAS at the application server level. CyclePro is an effective product life cycle management solution. By concentrating on the Intellectual Property Creation aspects of product development, CyclePro enables companies to reduce their time to market.

"Our engineers are very pleased with JOnAS. We have been constantly surprised at the number of resources on the web regarding JOnAS. I am pleased to report that we have NOT had to contact the JOnAS development at any point in our product development. All of our questions have been answered from resources on the web. This speaks to the wide-spread use of JOnAS and it's stability. An open source application server enables startups like ours to conserve the much needed cash." said Milind Parick, NeoSavant Inc. founder.

Lofi Dewanto, OpenUSS Software Architect said: "Before we began with the OpenUSS project, we performed market research in Learning Management System (LMS) and found no truly component-oriented, Open-Source-GPL-based and at the same time Enterprise-Java-based LMS. After deciding to use Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), we had to look for the right EJB container. For us it is very important to use 100% Open-Source Enterprise Java Architecture. This means that we had to not only use all Open-Source tools but also search for an Open-Source EJB container to build our system. Two Open-Source EJB containers were available at that time: JOnAS and JBoss. After analyzing both products, we decided to use JOnAS because of its simplicity. It was very straightforward to install the product, and to develop and deploy EJB within JOnAS. We are also very impressed with the high quality of the JOnAS documentation. Now, OpenUSS is in production and has to serve about 10000 users (students, professors and assistants) at our and other institutions. We are very happy about this. Many thanks to the JOnAS team, which is always there to answer our questions! What we would like to see in the future is support for clustering in JOnAS, so we can distribute our EJB in different machines. We need this because we are planning on using OpenUSS to serve as an "Open and Free" Application Service Provider (ASP) for universities, schools and company training. Just comparable with SourceForge for developers! "

QUIPSY QUALITY GmbH, with its H.Q. and R.& D. located in Pforzheim/Germany, is specialized in computer aided quality assurance systems (CAQ). QUIPSY has been shipping their own quality management products QUIPSY(R) CAQ, QUIPSY(R) FMEA and many more to over 900 industrial companies in the manufacturing sector around the world (mostly Germany and neighbours); this represents more than ten thousand users.The main use of the QUIPSY application is to control all aspects of quality in a manufactoring or service company. For that reason, the software allows to plan, seize and analyze quality related aspects of manufacturing and service business processes. This includes conformance to ISO 9000+, QS 9000, TS 15949 and more quality related standard.

Its a strategic move for QUIPSY to support the J2EE(R) standard. As part of this strategy, the product is being ported to an 100% J2EE environment, In the longer term, this new version will be deployed at all customer's sites so that they can take benefit of this standards and open environment. QUIPSY has chosen JOnAS of three reasons: First, it is 100% pure Java, and as such, it is available on nearly every computing platform currently found at our customers' sites. Second, it is available, so we can go productive NOW. Third, it is free of charge, what is a great benefit for our customers. We are delivering and installing JOnAS with our own products which makes it very easy for our customers to go productive. Since our application conforms to J2EE, our customers are theoretically free to use the application server of their choice. In fact, since JOnAS is free and stable, we are assuming only a minor number of customers will be using another product.

High Sierra Technology used JOnAS to develop, deploy and run a electronic document tracking system, for a major company in the Transport sector in Spain. "We used JOnAS because we did not trust closed solutions would be able to keep pace with Technology development. In fact, we patched a couple of minor problems that we found in JOnAS for the second phase of the project, scheduled to start after the summer, when we will upgrade to JOnAS 2.0. This will include rewriting (and resubmitting) the patches to the JOnAS development team. We have found the development team honest and helpful. They did not try to hide shortcomings of the current state of the tools, and tried best to solve the problems we experienced. That is more than can be said about commercial tool teams.

www.sportmaschine.de is a J2EE based content management system for sport clubs and organisations. Our primary goal is to give those associations the technical basis so that they are able to easily offer an up-to-date homepage. The webmaster can finally concentrate back on his technical issues and hand over the content maintenance completely to the responsible person(s) from the different departments of the organisation. That's where it belongs to, but where it currently isn't from our rather big experience in this area. No HTML-Knowledge is required anymore to provide content, everything is managed through a backend application running on a standard web browser. Moreover, if for example two or more teams of one League have joined the service, they can complement each other because any result or statistic only needs to be entered once and is immediately visible for everyone. Taking all this (and more) into account, the "Sportmaschine" is in our opinion unique in terms of its generic system design.

Technically, the "Sportmaschine" is based on Jonas and has undergone many Jonas version updates since the start of the development in early 2001. It is in production since July 2002, although it will still be in a large pilot phase until mid of 2004. The breakthrough in terms of stability and performance was achieved with the upgrade to Jonas 3.1/Jetty 4.2.9. The developers consider their product as being truly production-ready since then. Jonas was the ideal basis from the very beginning. It is relatively easy to get started and we also got a good support from the mailing list when we had problems. Taking into account our experience from BEA Weblogic based J2EE projects from our "other businesses", we finally believe, that Jonas has grown to a real alternative for commercial projects. We ourselves do not hesitate to recommend and use it there if possible and not constrained otherwise through the customer's internal guidelines. The "Sportmaschine" is driven by "Bauer Internetprojects.de", located in Straubing/Germany.

TeraPort is an Application Service Provider for mechanical, electronic and life science engineering environments. Its innovative TeraPortal gives engineers access to a portfolio of development and simulation programs. TeraPortal manages both on-campus intranet and external Internet Compute Sites, providing global access to application programs and data. The only client requirements are an internet browser and access rights for the application software selected. The architecture of TeraPortal is based on JOnAS. TeraPort software engineers started with JOnAS as a good and simple Open Source implementation of EJB; as the experience was very good, they decided to use JOnAS for the product.

VeniceBridge^TM, a product that enables Global 2000 companies to access and exchange documents stored in the market leading content repositories, was developed to the EJB and J2EE standards. JOnAS provides us with an EJB environment that is embedded and distributed with our product to make it easier to implement and use. JOnAS is also one of our primary EJB development platforms. We have been thrilled with the commercial quality EJB implementation of the JOnAS product and with the support of the JOnAS user community.