Hello Jeroen
"J.T. Wenting" wrote:
> I think such request merely indicate the need for more complete
> documentation. Documentation (and you are doing a good job, but it should
> not be needed, Evermind should do it for us)
Yes, as I've said many times before, we are working on documentation but
things are not always going as fast as we would want them to. J2EE and
Orion is a vast area to cover and things are changing so rapidly that
documentation needs to be updated extremely often. However, we are
putting out more docs and will continue to do so, in a pace that will be
increasing.
> is the greatest weakness Orion
> has (not counting the bugs Swing causes in the tools, these are generic to
> Java applications using Swing).
> I like Orion, but without docs, I could never sell people on it (the people
> who need to set up and maintain it are not programmers, they are Unix and NT
> sysadmins...
Yes, and we have focused a lot on this for Orion 1.2 with the graphical
management console. However, it's more of a preview and it will improve
much in the coming versions. Of course graphical tools can never be a
replacement for quality documentation though, but you should definately
not have to be a programmer or a Unix or NT admin to install or maintain
Orion.
Also, I think you are being somewhat harsh in saying "without docs",
considering that there is a fair bit of documentation available. For
example our taglib tutorial has become the default tag library tutorial
for many people and you will find that for example Sun is linking to it
from their site for people who want to learn them. But yes, the
documentation isn't as complete as we would like and we'll continue to
work on this until it is. If anyone wants a job as a technical writer,
we are accepting applications, there is a lot of work to be done :)
> And at the price, it is difficult to get management people
> convinced anyway (the expensive == good syndrome is very strong here).
>
Of course we don't know all about this, but the expensive == good
syndrome does not seem to be a problem for sales at all. People are
getting more used to cheap or even free software every day and even
though we still see people thinking like that, we are certain that it is
a smaller problem than most people realize. Not a lot of people will
suggest that Solaris 8 isn't a viable operating system anymore just
because you can get it from Sun for the cost of media + shipping. More
and more people start to realize that software isn't like other
industries.
For a software purchase, you don't mainly pay for costs related to your
license, but to the research, development and marketing behind the
product. So if a company sells 10 licenses at $2,000, that's not much
worse than selling 1 at $20,000 (of course it's worse, but not much).
Whether you sell 10 cars for $2,000 or 1 car for $20,000 however is a
huge difference, since 1 car may cost $15,000 to manufacture. Because of
this, there's no reason why quality of a software product (unlike a car)
affects the price of the product. What does affect the price most is
where the companies think the optimal price lies to maximize the
revenue. We are certain that there will be a continued and increased
pressure on the larger vendors to lower prices and this will be good for
the whole J2EE industry.
Regards,
Karl Avedal
