Re: POLL: what are you missing in apache-like functionality?
Hello Jeroen "J.T. Wenting" wrote: I think such request merely indicate the need for more complete documentation. Documentation (and you are doing a good job, but it should not be needed, Evermind should do it for us) Yes, as I've said many times before, we are working on documentation but things are not always going as fast as we would want them to. J2EE and Orion is a vast area to cover and things are changing so rapidly that documentation needs to be updated extremely often. However, we are putting out more docs and will continue to do so, in a pace that will be increasing. is the greatest weakness Orion has (not counting the bugs Swing causes in the tools, these are generic to Java applications using Swing). I like Orion, but without docs, I could never sell people on it (the people who need to set up and maintain it are not programmers, they are Unix and NT sysadmins... Yes, and we have focused a lot on this for Orion 1.2 with the graphical management console. However, it's more of a preview and it will improve much in the coming versions. Of course graphical tools can never be a replacement for quality documentation though, but you should definately not have to be a programmer or a Unix or NT admin to install or maintain Orion. Also, I think you are being somewhat harsh in saying "without docs", considering that there is a fair bit of documentation available. For example our taglib tutorial has become the default tag library tutorial for many people and you will find that for example Sun is linking to it from their site for people who want to learn them. But yes, the documentation isn't as complete as we would like and we'll continue to work on this until it is. If anyone wants a job as a technical writer, we are accepting applications, there is a lot of work to be done :) And at the price, it is difficult to get management people convinced anyway (the expensive == good syndrome is very strong here). Of course we don't know all about this, but the expensive == good syndrome does not seem to be a problem for sales at all. People are getting more used to cheap or even free software every day and even though we still see people thinking like that, we are certain that it is a smaller problem than most people realize. Not a lot of people will suggest that Solaris 8 isn't a viable operating system anymore just because you can get it from Sun for the cost of media + shipping. More and more people start to realize that software isn't like other industries. For a software purchase, you don't mainly pay for costs related to your license, but to the research, development and marketing behind the product. So if a company sells 10 licenses at $2,000, that's not much worse than selling 1 at $20,000 (of course it's worse, but not much). Whether you sell 10 cars for $2,000 or 1 car for $20,000 however is a huge difference, since 1 car may cost $15,000 to manufacture. Because of this, there's no reason why quality of a software product (unlike a car) affects the price of the product. What does affect the price most is where the companies think the optimal price lies to maximize the revenue. We are certain that there will be a continued and increased pressure on the larger vendors to lower prices and this will be good for the whole J2EE industry. Regards, Karl Avedal
RE: POLL: what are you missing in apache-like functionality?
I agree, but I'm loathe to just blame Evermind for this. Have you seen the J2EE specs? They detail the way it's supposed to be. Are they clear? Well, no, not really... but they ARE the Orion documentation, more or less, and what peopel are clamoring for is for Orion to document the specs, but clearly. Orion doesn't really differ from the J2EE spec, that's one of the reasons it excels - if you know the spec, you can use Orion. (OTOH, if you I disagree here. of course, orion is very good at conforming to the spec but j2ee knowledge doesn't help you set up o/r mapping or find out how to specify your datasources for your entity beans etc. etc.. yes, there are a lot of questions on this list that indicate lack of j2ee knowledge but (hope i'm not offending anyone) those shouldn't worry evermind. IMO the j2ee spec is not that bad to read and not as unclear as you indicate. there are a few grey areas but most things that have neen asked on this list regarding j2ee are very clearly defined in (or intentionally excluded from) the spec. we have worked with orion for just over 10 months now and 90% of the problems we had with documentation were not lack of j2ee knowledge but orion-specific things. especially when internal things changed (like dtds for datasources etc.) and we didn't notice until we ran into problems. I have to admit that in many cases a look at the commented dtd would have solved the problem earlier ;-) but still there should be something like a change log especially when important things like dtds are changed. for very simple applications you can use orion with just j2ee knowledge. for advanced use you still have to dig into the internals yourself. the commented dtds (which hardly anyone seems to read) are a good start for docs but I think what's required is lots of examples that show advanced features like ssl, clustering, complex o/r mapping, deploying the same application multiple times on top of different datasources, use of servlet-chaining/filtering. could be just one large app that's well documented with an architecture diagram, sequence diagrams for the flow of control for certain scenarios etc.. I believe in learning by example and think that this kind of documentation would really be able to replace a formal reference manual (which is a lot more work). know the spec, you still have to know JRunisms, or Weblogic-isms, or whatever, due to wavering compliance.) This is a J2EE problem, not an Evermind problem. snip No doubt, but ... refer to the spec. Evermind does have a priority on docs, but the documentation has a num,ber of difficulties to work with that other servers don't - Orion has a goal of being ahead of the pack technologically, and since the drafts change all the time, Orion changes WITH them. (Did you know Orion supports EJB 2.0? Did you know there *was* an EJB 2.0?) That's one of the reasons the specs are used as documentation at the moment - Orion tracks them as they're coming out. Out-of-date docs aren't much better than no docs at all. well, hate to give the impression I'm con evermind (which I'm not) but the docs for the stable orion version (and therefore ejb1.1 which has been final for quite some time now) haven't improved a lot over the past few months. IMO changing specs are no excuse for lack of docs in this case. it has been a conscious decision on their part to put documentation on a lower priority than ejb2.0 compliance and overall stability and that's it. it's a legitimate decision but it's hard to imagine that they couldn't have invested more manpower for documentation in the past 6 months. regards, robert --- Joseph B. Ottinger [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://cupid.suninternet.com/~joeo HOMES.COM Developer (-) 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
RE: POLL: what are you missing in apache-like functionality?
-snip- I know that, you know that, but I work at a large corporation where policies are set by people who either have never worked in IT, or have quit a long time ago. They do think that way (why else do iPlanet, Oracle and Weblogic still sell strong?). Not that you should increase price (though some do it) of course, your client base will likely take a while longer to include the really large companies. -snip- generally agree with inexpensive != bad BUT i think there is a tendency towards simplifying things a little too much. haven't used IPlanet but as far as weblogic is concerned you DO get excellent documentation, lots of tools/certified third party products, worldwide support partner network, official support for verisign certificates, a product that has undergone very rigorous testing in lots of different software/hardware environments (anyone knows that the concept of "it's all java therefore it works on any platform" is only half the truth in an imperfect world with buggy VMs and OSs), clustering and http(s) tunneling that has been used extensively in production and that's at least part of what you pay for with those prices. even if orion has the better architecture and the more talented architects/developers you cannot make up for all of this stuff that easily if you don't have the manpower (which I presume evermind doesn't). don't get me wrong. I think orion is an outstanding product but it clearly has some weak spots compared to some major players which it makes up for by the price, standards conformance and good architecture but it is a trade-off and everyone have to make their decision based on what they think is more important. if you have a websphere application server (no matter how crappy it may be) running on an as400 for an online banking application and you get performance/stability problems and you are a key account for ibm they fly in a specialist for exactly that platform/software combination it noone else can solve the problem. you simply cannot get that level of support for orion, no matter how much money you pay. people who need that simply cannot be advised to use orion (yet), period. If you can live with that (which we luckily can), you get a very good j2ee platform for an unbeatable price. that's the deal. regards, 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
JBuilder as an IDE for Orion - Can this work?
Like many participating on this list, we are in the early stages of trying to set-up our development and infrastructure platform. We are building apps that use both JSPs/Servlets in the web tier and EJB's in the application tier and really like Orion for this.We also really like JBuilder as an IDE and debugging environment. We are trying to figure out: 1. Is there any way to connect the JBuilder debugger to the Orion app server? 2. If so, do you need to use the Enterprise edition of JBuilder to accomplish this? 3. If not, what are folks using out there? Thanks in advance for any assistance, Marc
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Orion and SSL......
Hi guys, I have created an application that runs with and without SSL. Is there anyway i can secure certain pages inside that application using SSL like test1.jsp,test2.jsp and at the same time keeping test3.jsp non-SSL.. i have tried playing with web.xml...but it didnt help... security-constraint web-resource-collection web-resource-name/web-resource-name url-pattern/myAPP/Test1.jsp/url-pattern /web-resource-collection auth-constraint role-nameusers/role-name /auth-constraint user-data-constraint description/description transport-guaranteeCONFIDENTIAL/transport-guarantee /user-data-constraint /security-constraint Any help will be appreciated. Thank you for your time... Hashim Merchant winmail.dat
http session timeouts
The site I'm working has a custom login component where users must have
a valid username/ password combination. I would like to redirect or
present a user with a message when a Http session timeout has
occurred. You know, "your session has expired, so you must re-login"
message or something similar.
I'm in the beginning stages of the code. So far, the app stores certain
information about the user in a http session Java Bean, so I'm thinking
of checking for the existence of this bean in a Controller servlet to
determine if the Http session has timed out:
if (javabean == null) {
String message = "Your session has timed out, please login again";
}
else ...
Any opinions on this? (including other, better ways to achieve this
functionality)
-Todd
EJB example - news
hi there Can anyone pls tell me how to use the 'news' ejb example? what is the default login/passwd?? and how to add more users? regards, James
RE: Documentation initiative
I agree with all these comments... As a new Orion user, I'm most interested in seeing live samples that do more than the most basic things. Also, I have had the most trouble with deployment. So, several good, easy to follow source samples with deployment descriptors and the deployment procedures outlines would be really, really great... Jim --On Monday, August 21, 2000 10:54 AM +1000 Mike Cannon-Brookes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: These are all good ideas Kevin, I agree contributing docs to OrionSupport is a good idea, but docs themselves can be tricky to write - if I'm interpreting the list correctly, it's _sample applications_ that people want. Perhaps if people have code / apps they don't mind Open Sourcing, we could get a library of 'good', well documented applications on Orion Support? (I have one HUGE app that will be out within the next two weeks that is OSS and uses everything Orion has to offer) As for the tools, I've told the team many times that my personal opinion is tools should be Open Source. They don't sell the tools, they sell the app server. I know myself, Joseph, Victor and a few of the other 'Orion oldies and know-it-alls' would be happy to hack at the admin tools to make them better. (And with the upcoming J2EE Management Spec we could make them kick ass tools for _any_ app server, which ironically would bring more cred to Orion if we could best WL's buggy console) Installer is not so useful IMHO, I'm sure the Orion team are working on tools to tweak the running server's values, and setting up the initial values are pretty much what Orion does out of the box? Mike -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Kevin Duffey Sent: Monday, 21 August 2000 7:53 To: Orion-Interest Subject: Documentation initiative Hey all, Since so many of us love Orion, or are trying to love it but have problems understanding some things, how bougt we help out the Orion team by documenting as much as we can? I for one have been using it for quite some time and have some knowledge of some areas. I would love to learn other areas as they become available. Joseph is doing a good job with orionsupport.com, and he has asked for any contributions. For those of us that feel we know the product somewhat well, lets do our part. Hell, unlike other products, Orion is free for everything except production, and that cost is a fraction of the cost of other app servers. Also, while the team hasn't opened up the source or anything for us to contribute, I was thinking of doing a Wizard installer in Java, but I am not very good with SWING. Right now you unzip, configure the xml files, and let it rip. Maybe a simple installer that the team can use and package that has a wizard interface for setting up the common areas would be nice. Anyone want to help with this? Would the Orion team mind if we help out in these areas? May be a while as I don't have much time, but it might help on the installation woes some people seem to have. If anyone to everyone is in agreement (including Orion team), lets help kick the Orion App Server into high gear so it can kick the crap out of those much much much more expensive app servers that don't quite follow the standards as well. If all in favor, maybe we can start off a chapter index in this list (or on the orionsupport.com site) and contribute to areas needing documentation as well as writing those. Also, I believe a good "review" of docs by all involved would allow for the most accurate docs instead of relying on faith of one person. No offense, but I sure don't want people reading what I write assuming its 100% right. I would rather have others look it over and make sure it makes sense, is easy to follow along and actually works as stated. Awaiting replies.
