Hello Samuele,
> I think that the strength of Jrun is that it can plug in into the most
> famous web server. Orion can't do that, isn't it ? So if a customer
> already have his web server why do he have to change it ? I think that
> plug-ins are a good idea, also if the perfomances of orion are great (
> this doesn't mean nothing for a customer that already has a WS ).
>
First, we do in fact plan to make Orion integrate with at least Apache and
IIS. In fact, internally we've made orion serve JSP:s for IIS. However
this is not high on our priority list for several reasons and we will not
suggest that Orion is run as a plugin. The biggest reason is that it is a
technically very bad solution.
1. The integration between web servers and servlet engines is not
seamless. The normal way a servlet engine plugin (for example JRun) talks
to the web server is via a socket. This is bad for performance.
2. Any URL could be served by the servlet engine. This means the web
server can not even process static files without asking the plugin engine.
Having 2 servers processing basically every request is bad.
The preferred way to deploy Orion is to let it be the only server. Note
that the Orion server is a full featured web server and does not only
support servlets and JSP:s but also cgi scripts, php, etc. Orion is also
faster at serving static pages than for example Apache. (Webbench results
will be posted shortly).
However, if you for any reason really want to use another web server and
use Orion only for Servlets, JSP:s and EJB:s you don't have to wait until
the plugins are avaialable. You could for example always put the orion
server on another port than the web server (like 81) and have the url:s to
your servlets be like http://foo.bar:81/servlet/baz.
>
> <question> Onto which platform can run Orion ? </question>
>
On the Java2 platform.
Karl Avedal
The Orion team
