This list has been getting alot busier for some time now. There are now more than 400 subscribers to this list and so far this week there's been 31 messages sent (32 including this one) and Tuesday isn't even over yet. For that reason we will start giving periodical information about this list. The purpose of this information is to lower the inconvenience caused by the amount of posts being sent to this list, since we realize that most of you have better things to do than to empty your mailboxes. We will also append some information about the latest developments. First, here are a few ground rules that we should all follow when posting to the list: 1. Post only to orion-interest when you think that your mail will be of interest for a large part of the Orion community. This is the fundamental rule and all others are basically versions of this one. Before you send, stop and think. Is this mail interesting for the people on this list, or is it more suitable for a smaller forum? 2. Send bug reports to [EMAIL PROTECTED] If you think that your problem is caused by an Orion bug, always send your mail there. We will archive those mails and make the archive accessible from the web, with follow-ups on the bugs. It is much harder for us to keep all the bugs in one place (and makes it harder for us to be able to give good feedback) if we receive them in many different forums. 3. Do not use the public mailing list as a way to get in contact with the Orion authors. We do try to follow the list regularly but the point of the mailing list is to allow different users of Orion to communicate with eachother and learn from eachother, not to create another communication channel with the authors. We have a few different mail aliases set up that will allow you to get a quicker response than you will get using the list: * [EMAIL PROTECTED] for business related questions * [EMAIL PROTECTED] for support questions (in theory only for customers, but in reality we try to answer everyone, but customers have priority) * [EMAIL PROTECTED] for bug reports, as mentioned above 4. Never send unsubscribe mails to the list. You can unsubscribe yourself from our webpage. Click mailing list, enter your address and press unsubscribe. If this doesn't work, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] and we will remove you. Just recently we added a filter that bounces all unsubscribe mails automatically, but of course, the filter can be fooled. As mentioned, this information mail also contains a few Orion updates to let you know what is happening and what will be happening in the near future. RECENT CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORIES As introduced last friday, the Java Developer's Journal now has a "Breaking News" service on their site for easy access to Java and XML news. This service is provided by Orion customers headlinewatch.com. The entire headlinewatch.com system runs on top of Orion Application Server. This week, the MMbase (www.mmbase.org) dynamic content management system was launched. They have used the Orion Application Server during the development of their system and are using it for their deployed systems. Of course they use Orion to power their own website as well. MAJOR CHANGES IN LATEST ORION VERSIONS (the biggest changes last week) HTTP Performance enhancements. Xalan and Xerces are now used internally for Orion's XML needs. We are also looking into using Sun's JAXP enigine, but due to bugs that they haven't been able to fix yet we can't use it right now. However, Sun's engine is alot faster and alot smaller, so this is not a closed issue yet, there might be more changes in this area. To use Sun's JAXP enigine instead, start Orion using java -Dxml.parser=javax.xml orion.jar. Big improvements to the GUI assembly tools. Alot of work has been done to the GUI admin tool, although this is still strictly internal. Expect a release of this soon. About 50 bugs fixed during the week. MISC NEWS This week we'll put up order forms to purchase Orion using a credit card. Of course you can also pay using other means, expect more information once the forms are up. That's all for this information letter. The Orion Team
