phillies.com

I was up this morning at 4:30 AM. My 18 lb. Maine Coon cat Giacomo wasn’t taking no for an answer.
He likes to get on my chest and chew on my chin until I pay attention to him.

So, while I was up I went to the server. I remembered that Phillies tickets were going on sale this morning at 6 am. (Thanks ‘mo for getting me up!). http://www.phillies.com/ (and mlb.com) uses a child of the Netscape Application Server (which became iPlanet and now SunONE). You can tell by the URLs that they use. (As a consultant for the Sun/Netscape Alliance a few years ago I traveled all over Asia and Austrailia teaching/mentoring NAS and EJB)

So, here it is, 6:01am and I have my games for the year picked out. I try to book them but for an hour and a half. I keep getting redirected to a JSP that says “We’re sorry, we were unable to process your request due to high transaction volumes. Please try to submit your request again”. Yikes. I’m talking about the Phillies here –you know – the team that was in last place for most of last year. You might expect that from a team with fans. 🙂
Finally I got through. I booked 3 of the 4 games I wanted but on the fourth I get “Your order was not completed in the required time and has timed-out. If you wish to purchase tickets you must start your order over”. Bang…Zoom…To the moon Alice… Is this a way to design a web site?

So, how are they doing it? Are they using Sun servers with Oracle? I can’t tell. Are they using EJBs for read only data (at that point I was “browsing” available seats and not booking – which was several pages later). Who developed this site? I wonder what load testing tools/methods they used. I’d like to see their “architecture” too.