At 17:36 24.11.00 , you wrote:
>You know..while I would love to see source for the sole purpose of allowing
>us to help the Orion team debug and fix problems (not to allow a fork of the
>product), I think everyone needs to think about other products. Do you think
>WebLogic, Inprise, Oracle, IBM and others are going to release their source
>so the committed followers can help them fix bugs. That would be ideal..but
>none of them do it. Thus far I don't know of any full J2EE ready app servers
true but we are talking different quality levels. since I've started
working with oracle 3 years ago I haven't had any showstopping bug while I
have been in very bad situations (even lost money due to project deadlines
we could not keep because of serious bugs that kept the project from
completion or workarounds that took a lot of manpower) with orion. The
problem is, it feels like an open source project (great software but no
real QA) but without the source and I have personally experienced that as a
very dangerous combination. I would be very happy and keep my mouth shut if
orion would just stay the way it is featurewise but really work reliably
with the features it already has until there is enough manpower at evermind
to do both QA and new features.
just to give you an example, I first reported problems with the
exclusive-write-access="false" option (which you need when someone else but
the cmp engine writes to the db, pretty common setup especially with a
given db schema with cascading deletes) which is seriously broken (I
switched an existing working app to that option and the simplest things
would break immediately) at the end of august. even the validity-timeout,
that can be used as a workaround, was broken (pk checks were still being
done on cached entities regardless of timeouts). ok, a few days later there
was a new version which removed one problem but broke other stuff related
to that. about a month later the validity-timeout issue was fixed while I
had taken the heat from my customer and made all kinds of concessions
because I didn't want to recode the entire app using sql and kept waiting
for a fix. up until now (3 months later), the
exclusive-write-access="false" option is still broken (which I regard as
one of the most important things in an appserver, it must protect the
integrity of my data in the most ROBUST way possible). we've managed to
work around that but it still doesn't feel good and I was disappointed to
see that the changes in the next version of orion were related to
implementing servlet 2.3 spec. if that are the priorities (features before
robustness) I don't feel that well about it as a customer who uses ejb and
cmp to just code against a spec and completely rely on the correctness of
the underlying platform to not worry about many low-level issues (wasn't
that the whole deal with ejb?). if a feature is implemented and documented
then I as a customer expect to be usable but I have run into many problems
which led me to believe that many of the features have proof of concept
quality. I would even be able to live with that if reported bugs were given
absolute priority over implementing ejb2.0, clustering, servlets2.3. I have
completely abandoned the thought of using JMS (although I would like to in
a few apps) because I'm afraid I'll run into more serious problems in the
middle of a project and some of the postings on this list have definitely
assured me that it was the right decision.
robert
>that have released their source. I have heard of JBoss..but I don't know
>much about it.
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Gerald
> > Gutierrez
> > Sent: Friday, November 24, 2000 1:10 PM
> > To: Orion-Interest
> > Subject: RE: Anyone using Orion in production? [long]
> >
> >
> >
> > The Orion FAQ (http://www.orionserver.com/faq/#-551543462) actually says
> > that they might be sued by Sun if they "offer ... source under a
> > Linux-style license", not simply that they provide source (possibly under
> > an NDA). Perhaps there are no legal reasons if they choose to do
> > the latter
> > (and there are with the former), but my inclination is that Evermind
> > doesn't want to release source, not that they can't. I respect it, but I
> > must disagree for a number of technical and business-related reasons.
> >
> > Like someone else said in this list, that there are serious bugs and that
> > people using the product are powerless to fix it themselves is enough to
> > make one look for an alternative solution. The price is a fair and the
> > performance is excellent, but what good is it if it is
> > unreliable? This is
> > not a word processor or a web browser; a crash a day, week or
> > month is not
> > tolerable.
> >
> >
> > At 11:42 AM 11/24/2000 -0800, you wrote:
> > >Really? How can they be sued by Sun for their own source? JBoss isn't
> > >getting sued..aren't they open source? I can't believe Sun could
> > sue anyone
> > >for making an open-source application server. Maybe there is something we
> > >don't know...??
> > >
> > > > -----Original Message-----
> > > > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > > > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Gerald
> > > > Gutierrez
> > > > Sent: Friday, November 24, 2000 10:16 AM
> > > > To: Orion-Interest
> > > > Subject: Re: Anyone using Orion in production? [long]
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > >However I can sympatize with Karl and Magnus. EJB is a very new
> > > > >technology. Shipping the source makes it relatively easy for the
> > > > >competition to copy the product which of course is the
> > downside. But I
> > > > >think shippingg the source would be for the better of the
> > server. Nobody
> > > > >is perfect and if all of us have our hands on the source
> > lots of those
> > > > >silly bugs should be fixed in much less time. Having to submit a
> > > > >testcase makes for a lot of effort on both sides since we
> > have to create
> > > > >a testcase which has to be recreated by the orion team and
> > tested. Most
> > > > >of these bug however would simply appear running your app through a
> > > > >debugger and jumping into the orion source.
> > > >
> > > > I've run into so many weird and absurd problems in Orion; all
> > it would've
> > > > taken for me to solve the problem and submit a patch would be a
> > > > grep in the
> > > > source tree. Alas, I cannot do this and I am stuck with an application
> > > > server that has many advantages and many disadvantages, which
> > > > more or less
> > > > cancel each other out. Many bugs I post as problems to the
> > mailing list,
> > > > many times without response, forcing me to submit some of them to
> > > > bugzilla,
> > > > where they go unnoticed.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Evermind's position, as stated on the FAQ, is that they would
> > be SUED by
> > > > Sun if they made their source code public.
> > > >
> > > > What?! What is the rationale behind this conclusion???
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> >
> >
>
(-) 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
