Jahia, the Swiss-based open source web content integration ISV backed by the European Parliament, has picked up Virgin America as a paying customer.

The budding California-based airline, which is promising to make in-flight cattle cars humane with mood-lit cabins, custom-designed leather seats, power outlets and in-flight Internet - is using Jahia to power its intranet as well as its onboard Wi-Fi.

Jahia kinda competes with proprietary widgetry like Documentum and Vignette but, aside from being way cheaper, functions more as a one-stop shop for document management, web content management and the company portal. It can handle all kinds of content, whatever the source, within one simple interface, including business, collaborative and social application portlets as well as widgets, gadgets, pictures, Office files and RSS feeds.

Jahia's support contacts run from $3,000 a year for a small web site. La Poste, the French post office, is paying around $278,000 a year (200,000 euros). The United Nations is forking out about $500,000 a year. The company claims 300 paying customers including Goldman Sachs, French government agencies and French banks.

Like any other good little open source firm, Jahia maintains a free community version as well.

The Java-dependent widgetry is based on Apache, Lucene, Pluto and Hibernate and s both web server- and browser-agnostic.