Hello Brien,
I'll try to answer most of your questions
> I had a few questions I was hoping someone could answer. I posted these a
> few weeks ago but got no response. I'm not sure it made it to the list.
>
> 1.) In the FAQ it mentions that Orion supports JSP and Servlet clustering
> but I haven't seen much documentation on it. How is the session information
> replicated? Are there multiple methods of replication? Do you have control
> over the replication? Any performance issues one should be aware of?
>
Normally the session is replicated to all servers, but in a big cluster you will
want to limit session replication to an "island" that keeps the specific session
(and browsers will stay within this island for the session).
> 2.) How soon do you expect EJB clustering to be available?
>
Right now we're totally focused on 2 things, QA and documentation. We are
building large test suites and we are correcting all bugs we find with our test
suites and bugs that are reported by users. This will be the case until we can't
find new bugs and documentation is of top quality. Some small features might of
course be added, but for big things I would expect over a month.
>
> 3.) In a medium-to-large-scale web application you need the ability to
> monitor server load and request-response-times in order to know when to add
> more servers and where bottlenecks are (e.g. which types of requests).
> Does/will Orion support anything like this?
>
Orion doesn't support much in this area natively. We recommend using a load
analyzer tool (there are many great tools out there for this) that will show how
your site is feeling. Of course, in many cases, a simple log analyzer will tel
you how much of your badwidth is used and a cpu/ram monitor will tell you if
you're out of ram and/or cpu.
>
> 4.) How do you use XSL or XSLT with Orion?
>
Simply add the following to your xml file:
<?xml-stylesheet href="/path/to/my/stylesheet.xsl"?>
and the stylesheet specified will be used to transform the xml file.
>
> 5.) Transparent support of WAP is mentioned (via XML jsp's and XSLT). WAP
> doesn't support cookies, does it? I assume you have to write your app to
> use URL rewriting (and manually wrap all URLs in your JSP's with
> response.encodeURL(),
> etc)?
>
You are right, WAP currently does not support cookies. However this should be
auto-detected and URL rewriting will set in. In some cases however, the server
will not be able to automatically do this (with dynamically created links, etc.)
and you will manually have to make sure you encode the session into the URL.
>
> 6.) How do you use the O/R mapping mentioned recently?
>
Look out for better O/R documentation soon. This is work in progress.
>
> 7.) I know you guys are really busy coding but is any work being done on a
> full-fledged user manual? I really like Orion and feel it's an awesome
> server however the lack of documentation is still a major weakness. I know
> there are lots of things that Orion can do for me that I'm not using simply
> because I don't know it's there or don't know how to use it.
>
There will be a big update in the documentation this week and there will also be
a large J2EE example application put online. I am sure these things will make
things a whole lot easier for alot of people. We will keep trying to improve
documentation after this. If you have any suggestion on what needs more
clarification, what tutorials or how-to's you want, please give us some ideas
and we will do our best to make them.
>
> Thank you,
> Brien Voorhees
Regards,
Karl Avedal
