Interesting Rob. I completely agree with you. I think the Orion team is
trying to stay ahead of the big boys by implementing Servlet 2.3 and EJB
2.0, if not any other vendor other than WebLogic. I am curious about one
thing. There are supposedly lots of people paying licenses for Orion,
including my company. At $1500 a pop (US), if they had a few hundred
licenses, that would equate to a pretty darn good piggy bank. Why would they
not be hiring more developers, QA, and support people? I recall last year
they were saying that sales were going pretty good and they planned on
having more than 20 employees by years end, mostly in the support area. Is
there any news of this? When will their web-site look like a professional
company..in that they have information about the company, privacy statement,
contact info (actual phone numbers), and so on? These are the things I
question. For over a year I have been supportive of Orion (and still am)
because its a great product at an unbeatable price. But I like yourself am
starting to wonder whats going on. I would think VC funding wouldn't be hard
for them because they are already profitable (or should be) and they have a
killer application. VC funding would give them the money they need to hire
more people and move Orion up a step, in line with SilverStream, GemStone,
and so on. They are still a ways off from WebLogic and WebSphere (in overall
completeness). I still think they should charge more! I hate the idea of per
cpu, but maybe $5K per server, which still puts them below the price of JRun
3.0, WebSphere, WebLogic, SilverStream, iPlanet, OAS, Inprise, and every
other app server that I have knowledge of.
Bah..this seems to be a wasted conversation these days. I had (and to some
degree still have) great hopes for Orion, but it seems they are taking a
long time in getting documentation, support, and so on. Like I said before,
Orion to me is much like linux. Its more of a hacker/developer app server
than it is mainstream. While it can compete in performance with the best of
them (as linux does) and its as stable in most aspects (as linux is), its
not quite ready for the "real" market (linux is getting there). However, I
will continue to hang on to see what comes about. I am betting the farm on
Orion right now because I hope they continue to prosper and grow into a
formiddable opponent of WebLogic. I do agree though..stop the EJB
2.0/Servlet 2.3 support and build upon the existing EJB 1.1, etc. I don't
agree about your clustering thing..I think a good app server should support
clustering from the getgo, which I believe Orion does decently.
> 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
>
>
