I have to agree with Robert. (with the same caveat, I think Orion is a great
product.... We even recommended it to some clients who wanted a J2EE
solution without the cost of BEA or Netscape)
There are some things that right now I don't feel comfortable with in it
though.
Clustering... Clustering is just downright a pain in Orion :) I would love
to see something like IPlanet 6's control panel to control clustering and
failover.
Deployment... Deployment is not terribly difficult if you know what you are
doing, but my last project had us using IPlanet 6 and I had developers who
had never deployed J2EE apps able to deploy them easily using their
deployment tool. It took minimal training for the front end guys to get them
trained to use it, and deploy the application without having to come to me
for help. That would be nice and is a step closer with the console now in
Orion.
Pricing is very nice, but believe it or not we have had clients bow out of
Orion based on it being too inexpensive. I know that is terrible, but for
some reason some clients seem to equate big bucks with maturity and
reliability. You wont find me complaining though, heck where else is there a
free for development commercial server?
Al
----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Krueger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Orion-Interest" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Saturday, October 21, 2000 3:19 PM
Subject: RE: Orion in production
At 07:46 21.10.00 , you wrote:
>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.
<snip/>
ok, sorry to somehow take the part of mr. bad guy here but I get the
feeling someone following this discussion IMHO doesn't really get the right
impression. it's a little bit too black and white. first of all, let me say
that after about a year of intensively using orion in development and half
a year in production, I'm a generally very satisfied customer and I do
appreciate the completeness, standards conformance, speed, great logical
concept of orion. however, I think it's oversimplifying things to say it's
just marketing that makes the big names so expensive (it's a significant
factor, though) and it's not a very good assessment to say that orion beat
all competitors' asses if it weren't for the lack of good documentation.
there are some significant things that are a lot of work and therefore very
expensive like QA and rigid testing with many, many hardware, software, db,
vm combinations that a company the size of evermind simply cannot deliver
(have you looked at the number of platforms you can get websphere for?).
anyone who says that write once run anywhere really works 100% probably
hasn't been involved in too many real-world projects where certain
combinations of VMs and software just crash under certain load conditions.
that's why e.g. weblogic is tested and certified for a particular platform.
of course, part of this certification stuff is to keep the typical IT
manager happy but to say it's all bullshit is off-target and not very
professional IMO. when orion became officially stable (1.0) it still
contained many very serious bugs and I presume it wouldn't have been 1.0
time if it hadn't been for J1. the flexibility and development speed of the
orion team takes it's toll in the number of fundamental bugs in those very
features. with a few exceptions I doubt many of those would slip through
bea or ibm QA. I sometimes think it feels like an open source project but
without the source. a very loyal user community and very short release
cycles but still lots of rough edges.
don't get me wrong. I'm a great fan of orion and I think for many projects
it's an unbeatable tool with no serious competitors especially considering
the price and I think magnus and karl are extremely good software
architects and true J2EE wizards but I think there are some more things one
has to consider before making the kind of statements that have been made in
this thread. at my company we share the experiences with a very efficent
development environment using orion together with jikes and ant but we also
had our share of spending considerable amounts of time working around
serious bugs or waiting for fixes for showstoppers.
to sum things up, IMO orion is a great deal and it completely meets (and
exceeds) the requirements many people have for an appserver but it does
have its rough edges (and that's not primarily the documentation IMO). I'm
quite sure that those will fade away eventually but evermind still has some
work to do in the areas QA, support and documentation.
let's just hope they don't get bought out and manage to grow quickly yet in
a controlled manner so they can continue developing a kick-ass server.
just my 2c
robert
(-) Robert Kr�ger
(-) SIGNAL 7 Gesellschaft f�r Informationstechnologie mbH
(-) Br�der-Knau�-Str. 79 - 64285 Darmstadt,
(-) Tel: 06151 665401, Fax: 06151 665373
(-) [EMAIL PROTECTED], www.signal7.de
