The French Administration goes Open Source

I am a software engineer working in France. In 2002 I worked on the Antares project that was being developed by the French Education Ministry. Antares is a web based system that allows lecturers and professors to submit on-line applications for jobs at French Universities. It is essentially a workflow management system. What was interesting from a software engineers viewpoint is that the system was being developed using Java Enterprise technology (EJBs, JDBC etc) based on the Open Source JBoss server and running on a Linux Cluster (in production Weblogic was substituted for JBoss).

The French system of Universities and Grandes Ecoles (roughly the equivalent of big US Universities) produce many excellent software engineers. A look at some well known OS projects confirms this, Jakarta Cactus and JBoss being a couple of examples.

About The Author

David George is an software engineer located in Grenoble, France. He specialises in Java Performance Tuning and Consulting on J2EE project management.