I like to open this up with a "marketing" hat vs. a "development" hat. I think you
need to familiarize yourself with Orion, and look at the "official" doc, what there is
of it at www.orionserver.com, plus the unofficial material at www.jollem.com and
www.orionsupport.com. I actively encourage students and developers to play with Orion
and jboss/tomcat (www.jboss.org). The only thing I am not sure of (and this list
hasn't answered the question) is how would Orion hold up traffic wise, in say running
an "e" store the size of Sears and Roebucks? Is this just a task suitable to the big
guns, like WebSphere and Weblogic, or can Orion stand up in the boxing ring? I see
Orion and the open source contenders making a nice niche into the low and middle
company markets, but not into the fortune five hundred (at present). A big bottleneck
is the support and documentation issues. If you look at the open source databases,
for example (www.mysql.com and www.postgresql.org), the first h!
!
!
as excellent documentation and the second is OK. Both offer excellent support
services though companies and lists, but they have a hard time upsetting the big guns,
such as Oracle. And you have to enlighten companies about what the little guy offers
(besides price) that the big name does not.
(my .02 insights)
-----Original Message-----
From: Korosh Afshar [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2001 9:17 AM
To: Orion-Interest
Subject: RE: A thank you to Orion from the Annapolis Java User Group
We are starting to venture into the orion world cautiously but steadly.
would you care to share any insight on pitfals to watch for or issues to
deal with or anything that might hinder our development effort if not dealt
with upfront?
this could be technical or non-technical issues particular to orion.
any such insight from your students would do much to improve the product and
for us to deal with appropriately.
k.
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Michael Van
Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2001 1:17 AM
To: Orion-Interest
Subject: A thank you to Orion from the Annapolis Java User Group
To Orion and the people who offer support for this product:
THANK YOU!
My name is Michael Van Geertruy and I am the founder and CEO of the
Annapolis MD Java User Group, JUGerNaut (501-c-4). For the last 15 weeks
I've been teaching a course in this user group called "Java and the
Internet", using the OrionServer as a teaching platform. That is, each
participant in the course was required to download a version of Orion at
home, and then use OrionServer for thier work in the course.
I chose Orion Server for a number of reasons. Most notably:
* It is free for use as a development environment.
* It is a TRUE implementation of the J2EE platform.
* Its CPU footprint is very small.
* It has a robust implementation of servlets.
* It has easy to understand, XML-based configuration files.
* It contains xalen and xerces, which allowed us to touch on XSLT's.
On behalf of the JUGerNaut organization, I would like to thank you for
offering this tool for use in our development environment. Without it, we
would not have been able to offer this training for FREE (the participants
paid no money to attend the course). Indeed, many of the participants had
prior experience programming EJB's and commented on how superior your
product implements the J2EE when compared to Sybase, Oracle, and
BEA-Weblogic.
Oral course surveys revealed that the participants in the course felt more
secure with the Java technologies of servlets, JSP's, CMP, and BMP using a
home-grown database-connection-pooling bean. Additionally, this course
produced an EJB that will be used by a local charity organization (saving
them thousands of dollars in development costs). Without Orion Server, the
quality of training that we gave and the direct impact this program had on
our community would never have happened.
By offering this training for free to all participants, and by training them
using Orion Server, we are growing EJB specialists in Maryland who are
partial to using Orion Server. This translates to experienced engineers
expressing an affinity for Orion Server in the workplace over other
competing technologies. I sincerely thank you and your organization for
providing us this invaluable resource.
Thank you,
Michael L. Van
CEO, JUGerNaut
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
PS. We are holding a graduation ceremony for this course and others on
March 14, 2001. After the ceremony, we are offering open enrollment into
JUGerNaut (free) and thus, to a slew of courses we will be offering (free to
all participants). They are:
Java Programmer Level Certification (13 - 22 weeks)
Java Developer Level Certification (16 weeks)
Java Architect Level Certification (depending on demand)
J2ME (the vm used on embedded systems)
Java Security API (14 weeks)
All courses use peer instruction (the students use books and a syllabus to
guide them as they study the topics together) and all courses are free to
partipants. Additionally, we are rolling out a new legal-referral plan to
all members that will help to ensure they will never be "stiffed" on a
contract again. Please contact me for more information.
