Wotif.com

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Wotif.com (pronounced "What if.com") is a popular Web site for business and leisure travelers in the United Kingdom, Europe and Asia to snag last-minute discount bookings at approximately 11,000 guest establishments worldwide. In fact, in 2006 the site accounted for 38 percent of all online accommodation sales in Australia.

With operations in six countries, Wotif.com attracts around 3.2 million visitors each month and books more than 200,000 reservations monthly. Users can research accommodations, compare prices, and make reservations through online credit-card transactions.

For its Web platform, Wotif.com was using the Orion J2EE 1.3 application server. But as the volume of users and business transactions increased, the environment began experiencing growing pains. So in 2006, Wotif.com decided it was time to rethink its infrastructure needs.

The company wanted an innovative yet cost-effective platform that would accommodate the site's growing traffic. In addition, Wotif.com wanted the assurance of reliable product support for the new landscape. Wotif.com chose to construct a foundation based on open standards Java technology and provision it using open source products.

“We wanted a core language and a core environment, not just a workaround. Once you have an open standard, it means you can have alternative implementations, and the cost of change is far, far less so there's no significant impact on our business,” says Greg Luck, chief architect at Wotif.com. “With open source,” he adds, “we pay nothing for the product, and we pay only for the services we want.”

Wotif.com initially considered Red Hat JBoss and Apache Geronimo servers, but ultimately selected GlassFish. GlassFish is based on the technology of Sun Java Platform Enterprise Edition 5 Application Server and its productized counterpart, the GlassFish Enterprise Server. “We did a test port of part of our main application and did performance and stability tests in our performance environment. The results were very good.” says Luck. The company started with GlassFish v1 and then upgraded to GlassFish Enterprise Server v2. For support, Wotif.com contracted a Sun Software Service Premium Support plan.

As part of the re-engineered foundation, the company also migrated from Apache Active MQ 3 to Open Message Queue 4.0, the community version of the Sun Java System Message Queue. Because the standard is stable, the company's ability to move to another JMS product was very easy. “We are very much message-oriented and wanted a a messaging centerpiece for the architecture that we could rely on,” Luck explains. “Sun Message Queue has a long history and lots of large enterprise customers using it.

Luck is pleased with the combination. “GlassFish has been very performant and stable in production and we've found Open Message Queue to be faster than Active MQ and rock solid in production” he says. “We don't do scheduled restarts of GlassFish or Open Message Queue — we are able to leave them running until it's time to actually put a new piece of software out, and that's the way we like it.”

With the new infrastructure in place, Wotif.com can now scale up without cost or interoperability limitations, and that's a huge deal according to Luck. “For a rapidly growing Internet company like ourselves, we want to be able to scale the infrastructure without having to worry about costs,” he says. What makes it even better, he adds, “We have excellent support from Sun and the GlassFish community. It really is remarkable.”