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 Krüger
(-) SIGNAL 7 Gesellschaft für Informationstechnologie mbH
(-) Brüder-Knauß-Str. 79 - 64285 Darmstadt,
(-) Tel: 06151 665401, Fax: 06151 665373
(-) [EMAIL PROTECTED], www.signal7.de
