I think that Orion far outshines products like EA Server, Web Sphere, etc because
of the functionality available - and you are right - the docs are just a little more
pretty
and their tech support is absurdly costly and much less informative than what is found
on
this list.
When you purchase an App server for $35,000/cpu - most of that has little to do
with the App Server itself - it's the name and mostly the cost of their marketing
department
to go around an evangelize the product - like I said many of these big-name app servers
don't offer the functionality that Orion does. At my current site, we use EASever 3.61
and
it costs about 8,000/cpu - something to that effect - and it does not offer CMP - you
have to fake
it with Cocobase, which adds a lot more cost plus it adds more marketing people you
have to deal with. Plus EA Server is not without its problems either. When you pay
that much for a
server, you expect it to be more stable than a cheaper one. Orion is far easier to
deploy with, and for my money much more stable and feature rich.
If Evermind decides that Orion is not the revenue generator they thought it would be,
(I hope they stick it out, though - even raise the price if they have to) perhaps
making it into
an open source project along the lines of Enhydra would be an alternative approach.
They can
sell packaged versions, support, etc. I like open source because it allows good ideas
to continue if done right...and Orion should continue!
Obviously all companies have to please their investors, and since you don't have to be
very smart
to be an investor, then companies will continue to spend (waste?) tens(hundreds) of
thousands of
dollars on products that are all name and very little substance (for the money).
--- Arved Sandstrom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> IMHO the docs from the better-known app server vendors are just more pretty.
> In most cases they aren't actually better. The best docs I've ever seen for
> applications of this kind are those for open-source CORBA ORBs - ORBacus
> springs to mind. Maybe Orion can emulate those.
>
> Lack of support? I see better answers generated on this list than I would
> expect to get from obscenely-priced 24/7 technical support from a big
> operation.
>
> General sentiments (from a number of folks on this list) about IT managers
> covering their ass, well, I can't but agree. :-) I'm fortunate - I work on a
> small team (about 10 developers) in a small company. We went with Orion
> because it was free for development, and within 2 months were absolutely
> hooked. Nothing has changed our minds since. But we get the same pressure to
> expose well-known names to investors, so we've grudgingly acquiesced with
> experiments in swapping out Orion's webserver for IIS (even Apache won't do
> 'cause it's free), and have evaluated a whack of app servers for final
> production. So far none of them cut the mustard, so we haven't switched, and
> in the near term Orion can expect to get a $1500 cheque. :-) But down the
> road we may do iPortal, since my gut feeling is that that is probably best
> of a mediocre lot, and we can't avoid purchasing a "big-brand" server
> forever.
>
> We also found long ago that switching J2EE apps from server to server is
> non-trivial, regardless of the J2EE dream. We've never had the considerable
> time it takes to work out how to actually use one of these supposedly
> easy-to-use "name" app servers.
>
> One thing we'll probably end up doing is getting a pricey app server so we
> can tell outside folks we have it, and then continue using Orion so that we
> can assure ourselves that things will work. Seems stupid, but that's the way
> things are.
>
> One valid concern our business folks have is, "what is Orion's future?" _I_
> don't know where they stand from a business viewpoint (revenue, profits,
> business plan) and so it's really tough to know whether they'll be around in
> a year. What's to stop them being bought out? For this reason we'll end up
> using Orion in production to some degree, but we'll also have a shiny
> stand-by app server migration plan, JIC.
>
> Just some thoughts.
>
> Arved Sandstrom
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Juan Lorandi
> (Chile)
> Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 5:36 PM
> To: Orion-Interest
> Subject: RE: Orion in production
>
> [ SNIP ]
>
> And also, lack of support & documentation is becoming now, as most
> developers are finishing
> their work and reach deployment time(from what I pick up of many mails in
> this list), a critical point about orion.
> Many of us are reaching the point where we have to prove no only that
> orion's the best, but that it also is a good business
> choice. This is unfairly hard due to little colaboration from Evermind's
> team regarding, as said, support & documentation,
> tough it clearly seems to be changing.
>
> Perhaps its time for a change(and I hope it's a change that will keep my
> sorry a~s working with Orion ;-)
>
> JP
>
>
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