RE: Feedback on using Orion in Production.
Currently, Orion is being reorganized under another company, in order to provide enhanced support (at a higher price). There are plans to keep developer and non commercial licenses free, and hold the basic price at $1500. I understand those support plans are going slower then usual, and everyone on this list is looking for the final support plans to materialize. As far as other issues on this list, I will let others share in the response. -Original Message- From: Korosh Afshar [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2001 6:05 PM To: Orion-Interest Subject: Feedback on using Orion in Production. Hi list, I know this question has been asked before and I have seen very little response that would eliviate the anexiety I have in going full speed ahead with Orion for our production deployments. I have also looked at and solicited comments from the web site URL's posted on orionserver.com as the customers using Orion. I have not received any response from these companies concerning their experience with Orion. Please provide any feedback you have on: -how does orion perform in any production environment you have. -how many client users for the above. -how is the phone support for purchased licenses. -how is the email support from [EMAIL PROTECTED] -how well does clustering work with orion. Please provide ANY comments you have. I would realy really appreciate knowing of your experience. I have used it for one test deployment of an EJB application and I like the no-frill down to grind feeling I get from it but I had some bad experience last week when soliciting support from [EMAIL PROTECTED] for slow peforming 1.4.5 version. I finally reverted back to 1.3.8 which eliminated that problem. I had no response from support however. I am now a bit scared to suggest to management to use in production due to that experience so decided to get more information from the mailing list on the weaknesses of the product and quality of support people get.
Feedback on using Orion in Production.
Hi list, I know this question has been asked before and I have seen very little response that would eliviate the anexiety I have in going full speed ahead with Orion for our production deployments. I have also looked at and solicited comments from the web site URL's posted on orionserver.com as the customers using Orion. I have not received any response from these companies concerning their experience with Orion. Please provide any feedback you have on: -how does orion perform in any production environment you have. -how many client users for the above. -how is the phone support for purchased licenses. -how is the email support from [EMAIL PROTECTED] -how well does clustering work with orion. Please provide ANY comments you have. I would realy really appreciate knowing of your experience. I have used it for one test deployment of an EJB application and I like the no-frill down to grind feeling I get from it but I had some bad experience last week when soliciting support from [EMAIL PROTECTED] for slow peforming 1.4.5 version. I finally reverted back to 1.3.8 which eliminated that problem. I had no response from support however. I am now a bit scared to suggest to management to use in production due to that experience so decided to get more information from the mailing list on the weaknesses of the product and quality of support people get.
RE: Anyone using Orion in production? [long]
I too wonder about the legalities. Flashline shows several commercial EJB servers that are not J2EE licensed. There are also three open EJB server projects I know of (joNas, jBoss, and openEJB), that share their source code. I must confess, I don't even know what a company must do to become a J2EE licensee. Do you apply to Sun and send some money? -Original Message- From: Christian Sell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Saturday, November 25, 2000 4:26 PM To: Orion-Interest Subject: Re: Anyone using Orion in production? [long] 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??? Talk to Sun. J2EE licensing prevents an open source J2EE implementation (although a "compatible" implementation of J2EE might be okay. I don't know.) according to the flashline server comparison matrix (http://www.flashline.com/components/appservermatrix.jsp), orion is not a J2EE licensee. I cant imagine that simply implementing the publicized spec makes you liable to Sun..
RE: Anyone using Orion in production? [long]
If you think about it, Sun released their source code for JSP and servlets to Apache. IBM and Sun have people working and developing Tomcat, in addition to the Apache volunteers. Yet there are many commercial products implementing JSP and servlets (Jrun, Servlet Exec, Etc.). Similarly, if you have open source servers like jBoss, joNas, openEJB, etc., they will coexist among commercial versions. Yet both commercial and open source versions will stir companies to implement Sun J2EE solutions over Microsoft MTS. I think Orion is a great product, but it will take both open source and commercial products to give J2EE solutions popularity and keep Microsoft MTS at bay. -Original Message- From: Kevin Duffey [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, November 24, 2000 1:43 PM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Anyone using Orion in production? [long] 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???
Re: Anyone using Orion in production? [long]
On Fri, 24 Nov 2000, Gerald Gutierrez wrote: 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. They don't go unnoticed. Your recognition of notice is, um, understandably limited. 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??? Talk to Sun. J2EE licensing prevents an open source J2EE implementation (although a "compatible" implementation of J2EE might be okay. I don't know.) --- Joseph B. Ottinger [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://cupid.suninternet.com/~joeo HOMES.COM Developer
RE: Anyone using Orion in production? [long]
ry 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
RE: Anyone using Orion in production? [long]
At 10:35 25.11.00 , you wrote: Interesting Rob. I completely agree with you. I think the Orion team is snip/ I agree 100% with what you say (except for the 5k$ thing;-)) and I see I'm not the only one having these thoughts. 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. ok, maybe I'm biased on the clustering thing because we don't need it right now ;-). best 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
Re: Anyone using Orion in production? [long]
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??? Talk to Sun. J2EE licensing prevents an open source J2EE implementation (although a "compatible" implementation of J2EE might be okay. I don't know.) according to the flashline server comparison matrix (http://www.flashline.com/components/appservermatrix.jsp), orion is not a J2EE licensee. I cant imagine that simply implementing the publicized spec makes you liable to Sun..
Re: Anyone using Orion in production? [long]
Robert, thanks for your openness. Very insightful. - Original Message - From: "Robert Krueger" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "Orion-Interest" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, November 25, 2000 1:40 PM Subject: RE: Anyone using Orion in production? [long] 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.
Anyone using Orion in production?
Hi, I'd like to know, is anyone currently using Orion in a production environment? The rather high number of issues people report here bothers me because I'd like to get serious with a particular EJB server and my opinion was that Orion was the right choice because of it's low cost and features. In addition, I'd like to know if Orion's HTTP server is suitable for production work, I really would like to have a unified environment instead of having a separate web server for my JSPs and servlets. Regards, Paul _ Get more from the Web. FREE MSN Explorer download : http://explorer.msn.com
Re: Anyone using Orion in production?
Paul Kofon wrote: Hi, I'd like to know, is anyone currently using Orion in a production environment? The rather high number of issues people report here bothers me because I'd like to get serious with a particular EJB server and my opinion was that Orion was the right choice because of it's low cost and features. I've trying out orion and Inprise Application Server at the same time a while ago, following the orion list and the Inprise Application Server newsgroup and I must say the number of issues in the orion group are much lower than in the IAS forum. Most issues with orion relate to the EJB 2.0 spec which is implemented in Orion but still sortof in the BETA FASE (ejb 2.0 isn't even final yet). E couple of weeks ago a list passed with sites using Orion in Production and the list was rather long. In addition, I'd like to know if Orion's HTTP server is suitable for production work, I really would like to have a unified environment instead of having a separate web server for my JSPs and servlets. Eventhough not all my projects are JSP/Servlet/EJB i've started moving all my sites form Apache to Orion. The Orion HttpServer is quite fast and stable (Ok, not as stable as Apache, it might crash every two weeks or so but usually related to a bug in a jdbc driver i'm using). Sven -- == Sven E. van 't Veer http://www.cachoeiro.net Java Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] ==
Re: Anyone using Orion in production?
a while ago someone compiled a (quite impressive) list of production orion sites. Maybe look at www.orionsupport.com - Original Message - From: "Paul Kofon" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "Orion-Interest" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, November 24, 2000 11:12 AM Subject: Anyone using Orion in production? Hi, I'd like to know, is anyone currently using Orion in a production environment? The rather high number of issues people report here bothers me because I'd like to get serious with a particular EJB server and my opinion was that Orion was the right choice because of it's low cost and features. In addition, I'd like to know if Orion's HTTP server is suitable for production work, I really would like to have a unified environment instead of having a separate web server for my JSPs and servlets. Regards, Paul _ Get more from the Web. FREE MSN Explorer download : http://explorer.msn.com
Re: Anyone using Orion in production? [long]
my personal opinion on this is that evermind should deliver source (while retaining full rights on enhancements and bug fixes) with the product to eliminate that risk. other commercial projects like orbaccus (http://www.ooc.com) have shown that they still make a lot of money despite shipping source for more than five years now. I'm sure about 80% of the bugs our team has reported would have been fixed by us immediately or at least would have been accurately described to the line of source code that has to be changed. I've brought this up to karl and magnus but they don't want to do this and it simply is their baby and therefore their decision (they probably think I'm either a parrot or insane, repeating the same stuff over and over again ;-). Well you're no parrot and neither insane. I agree wholeheartedly. Before moving to Java I did a lot of development on Borland C++ Builder which ships with full source code to the vcl libraries. Serious bugs where easilly found by me and other developers, reported and corrected. It's lot's easier to report a bug if you can see the source code. 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. any other orion users have an opion on that? This was my two-cents. sven -- == Sven E. van 't Veer http://www.cachoeiro.net Java Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] ==
RE: Anyone using Orion in production? [long]
I quite agree with you Robert. I love Orion..and tell everyone I know to use it becuase of its great performance, features and so on. Lately though I haven't seen either Karl or Magnus on IRC chatting, nor have I seen an email in the list from them on any regular basis. I know myself and a few others are offering a good set of frameworks to be shipped with Orion and haven't heard a response in over a week of submitting the proposal. The frameworks would benefit Orion in that it would be like the big boys..offering more than just an app server. We would fully document them, support them, and they are open-source, so unlike Orion, if anything goes wrong, they are fixable by the ones using it. I quite agree that Orion should make source available for the use of allowing us to fix bugs if they crop up, and submit them for the Orion team to examine and if its a good fix, put it in the next build. This would require more people however..managing a product like Orion with lots of bug fixes coming in, merging them, testing them and so on..that would require alot of managing, and I get the feeling Magnus and Karl would rather write code than integrate fixes from many other people. On the other hand, for the original poster..I don't think you'll find a better Servlet/JSP engine, in terms of performance anyways. I think Orion has one of the fastest most stable web server engines around. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Robert Krueger Sent: Friday, November 24, 2000 4:51 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: Re: Anyone using Orion in production? [long] At 11:12 24.11.00 , you wrote: Hi, I'd like to know, is anyone currently using Orion in a production environment? The rather high number of issues people report here bothers me because I'd like to get serious with a particular EJB server and my opinion was that Orion was the right choice because of it's low cost and features. In addition, I'd like to know if Orion's HTTP server is suitable for production work, I really would like to have a unified environment instead of having a separate web server for my JSPs and servlets. yes, we've been using it for the past 6 months in production (mainly content management and ecommerce) with over 10 different j2ee applications extensively using servlets, ejb (lots of cmp) so I think I can say that I know what I'm talking about. it's a two-edged sword. as you mention, the integration of having one consistent all-java j2ee environment is of great value and orion's deployment concept is very logical and well-designed. however there are some serious issues with a number of parts of the server (check the archives for JMS and a number of issues regarding exclusive-write-access settings as examples) some of which have brought us in very awkward situations, many times having to work around them with a lot of effort. I would say that in some areas orion is production ready, in some it's not well-tested at all. do extensive testing and if every feature you use works, buy it. it's a great deal for the price. however, there is a substantial risk involved that you may run into a serious bug in a situation when you least need it and then you might be helpless with no source and maybe no fix available for a few weeks/months (been there). I'm not saying this to bash evermind (I sympathize a lot with them actually) but I'm simply speaking from experience to help other people make an informed decision as I would expect them to do if I asked about a product I don't know yet. my personal opinion on this is that evermind should deliver source (while retaining full rights on enhancements and bug fixes) with the product to eliminate that risk. other commercial projects like orbaccus (http://www.ooc.com) have shown that they still make a lot of money despite shipping source for more than five years now. I'm sure about 80% of the bugs our team has reported would have been fixed by us immediately or at least would have been accurately described to the line of source code that has to be changed. I've brought this up to karl and magnus but they don't want to do this and it simply is their baby and therefore their decision (they probably think I'm either a parrot or insane, repeating the same stuff over and over again ;-). It's only for that (having been helpless in many situations when we least neded it), that we are seriously considering moving to jboss as soon as their cmp support has met a certain level of quality, although their server is inferior to orion in many regards, especially as far as the overall integration is concerned. BUT their main architects/developers take the time to answer user questions on their user list every day and if there is a small bug (one or two line fix typically) you can just make it and submit it instead of spending 10 times as much effort assembling a test case to submit
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???
Re: Anyone using Orion in production? [long]
At 10:15 24.11.00 , you wrote: 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. Well, I wonder what projects like Jonas, EJBoss and JBoss do? I know that there are legal issues with sun but so far I have yet to hear a statement from evermind saying "yeah we would really like to ship with source and talked to sun but they wouldn't let us". I personally would love to trade offical J2EE branding (if that's the legal problem) with being able to do something about really awkward situations caused by unexpected bugs. I think they have made up their mind not to give source away and that's a decision I as a customer must respect but it has the potential to make me abandon a (generally great) server. I don't think legal issues have really been considered seriously (might be wrong though). main problem is that they (evermind) don't want it. nobody forces them to obfuscate their code (or is there such a statement in sun's J2EE license?). I feel like fighting windmills but it's just such a tempting thought and a frustrating situation. robert 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
RE: Anyone using Orion in production? [long]
At 10:10 24.11.00 , you wrote: I quite agree with you Robert. I love Orion..and tell everyone I know to use it becuase of its great performance, features and so on. Lately though I haven't seen either Karl or Magnus on IRC chatting, nor have I seen an email in the list from them on any regular basis. I know myself and a few others are offering a good set of frameworks to be shipped with Orion and haven't heard a response in over a week of submitting the proposal. The frameworks would benefit Orion in that it would be like the big boys..offering more than just an app server. We would fully document them, support them, and they are open-source, so unlike Orion, if anything goes wrong, they are fixable by the ones using it. I quite agree that Orion should make source available for the use of allowing us to fix bugs if they crop up, and submit them for the Orion team to examine and if its a good fix, put it in the next build. This would require more people however..managing a product like Orion with lots of bug fixes coming in, merging them, testing them and so on..that would require alot of managing, and I get the feeling Magnus and Karl would rather write code than integrate fixes from many other people. I strongly disagree. let's compare what happens now and what would happen then. now: I try to describe the problem that causes the bug to show maybe add some pseudocode and maybe even package an application with instructions how to reproduce the bug. they have to go through that maybe program a test case or at least install my test application and then start looking. then: I'd do all the stuff myself until I see that there is e.g. a wrong conditional at line xyz and submit the line number of the file with a description of what is wrong and why. I would say that I as a developer would be much quicker with the second kind of information. I'm talking about many very obvious silly bugs that you see when someone points you at. the hard and tedious(==time and resource consuming) part is nailing it down. not understanding it when someone points you to that. of course there would be bullsh*t bugreports also but that's also the case without source. parallel development doesn't scale well but parallel debugging scales extremely well (linux, apache being the best example). it's many people stressing the software being curious enough to dive into the code to do work (find bugs) that would otherwise have to be done by evermind. people (mostly highly qualified techies) work for you for free to get a stable and mature product. On the other hand, for the original poster..I don't think you'll find a better Servlet/JSP engine, in terms of performance anyways. I think Orion has one of the fastest most stable web server engines around. that one I would have to agree with. 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
RE: Anyone using Orion in production? [long]
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???
RE: Anyone using Orion in production? [long]
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 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???
RE: Anyone using Orion in production? [long]
At 05:36 PM 11/24/2000 -0800, 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 that have released their source. I have heard of JBoss..but I don't know much about it. As far as I know, the "Orion Team" consists of very few people (I believe it's two), not 20 or 50 or 100 or more. Although Orion is cheap, if something goes wrong, I'm not certain I can expect rapid response. It's also a tough sell to the "business side". There is a community of people using the product. All are technically adept. If each person only fixed one bug in the life of the Orion server, it would be far superior than what it is now. Make people print out an NDA, sign it, and fax it back. Make them understand that the code is proprietary. But by allowing people using the product to see the source, it becomes that much better a product. For $1500, I'm actually not "glad" that it is cheap, I'm worried that it'll be $1500 wasted when the crunch comes and Orion cannot deliver, and I have to pay for an alternative solution.
Re: Anyone using Orion in production? [long]
WebLogic, IBM, and Silverstream all offer source for a customer with a reasonable requirement. One of the company's I worked with was able to get the source commitment from all 3 vendors. I do think the customer and NDA requirement for source is a viable one. Especially since Evermind seems to be drafting friends/coworkers all the time. Heck, it certainly couldn't hurt. I wish this "interest" list operated in a similar fashion to the support list for another product I use, Stalker's CommuniGate Pro. Even though Stalker's a small company and I only spent $500 on their product, their mailing list is tightly monitored and questions rarely go unanswered by Stalker staff for longer than a few hours. While I'm sure working on Orion is time-consuming, I can imagine just the PR worthiness of a monitored list would be greatly beneficial. Personally, I think the Evermind guys overestimate the value of features and underestimate the value of vendor accessibility and involvement. The latter will frequently pays off in more handsome ways than the former. I would certainly trade interim EJB v2 support, since it's not even final yet, for the active involvement of Evermind staff in this list. If JBoss ever becomes a competent product I fear for Orion. -- Jason Rimmer [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Original Message - From: "Gerald Gutierrez" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "Orion-Interest" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, November 24, 2000 10:55 PM Subject: RE: Anyone using Orion in production? [long] At 05:36 PM 11/24/2000 -0800, 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 that have released their source. I have heard of JBoss..but I don't know much about it. As far as I know, the "Orion Team" consists of very few people (I believe it's two), not 20 or 50 or 100 or more. Although Orion is cheap, if something goes wrong, I'm not certain I can expect rapid response. It's also a tough sell to the "business side". There is a community of people using the product. All are technically adept. If each person only fixed one bug in the life of the Orion server, it would be far superior than what it is now. Make people print out an NDA, sign it, and fax it back. Make them understand that the code is proprietary. But by allowing people using the product to see the source, it becomes that much better a product. For $1500, I'm actually not "glad" that it is cheap, I'm worried that it'll be $1500 wasted when the crunch comes and Orion cannot deliver, and I have to pay for an alternative solution.
RE: Orion in production
I would also like to note Pramati (http://www.pramati.com). Their support is EXCELLENT... and they're by no means a HUGE company... On Today, Kyle Cordes ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: often the ones asked, and so on. That just isn't the case in any vendor that I have bought software from. I feel bad for you that your not getting responses, but I doubt you'll get much better support with the $15K per cpu WebLogic or any other vendor. Good luck though. On the other hand, if you call up Orion with a multiple of $15K at your disposal, you could probably arrange a very satisfactory support contract (Just guessing, maybe someone at Orion will state whether support contracts are available.) Kyle Cordes www.kylecordes.com I've approached them about support contracts, but they're looking for external providers, which isn't likely to be all that successful if you ask me, but we'll see. I'd love to pay them for support, but they won't take it. Gary
Re: Orion in production
On the other hand, if you call up Orion with a multiple of $15K at your disposal, you could probably arrange a very satisfactory support contract I've approached them about support contracts, but they're looking for external providers, which isn't likely to be all that successful if you ask me, but we'll see. I'd love to pay them for support, but they won't take it. h... wheels are turning...
RE: Orion in production
I haven't tried linux jvm yet, but I would think because you can run linux on a limited cheap setup very effectively and its resources are far less than the Win2K (I wouldn't use WinNT..too many crashes), I would deploy to linux over Win2K. However, I think for most things Win2K is easier to setup (at least for now) than linux. I think the GUI of linux is coming along nicely though. -Original Message- From: Russ White [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, October 23, 2000 6:26 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production Indeed with most JVM version the NT/W2K version will be faster than Linux. But now that the 1.3 versions from Sun IBM are out this is no longer true. I now almost exclusively deploy to Linux. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Holmes, George (TWIi London) Sent: Monday, October 23, 2000 6:00 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production I wasn't working on the project myself, and possibly gave a slightly mis-leading impression ;- To the best of my knowledge there were 8-12 Dual P3 500, each loaded with all the necessary EJBs, JSPs et al. and load-balanced using BIG IP from F5 Networks. However, none of the boxes were even touched in terms of resource consumption. Apparently, and this is a definite (sic) Windows NT 4/2000 with a dual-processor running Java out-performs a Linux box of the same spec running Java. Originally, the project was trialled to run on Linux, but it was discovered that NT 4 was faster!!! Has anyone else had any experience of this? I was told that it was due to better MP support in NT 4/2000??? George GEORGE HOLMES TWI Interactive Media House Burlington Lane LONDON W4 2TH ENGLAND TEL: +44 208 233 5631 FAX: +44 208 233 7701 CELL: +44 7968 918813 -Original Message- From: Duffey, Kevin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 20 October 2000 19:24 To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production Wow! That's pretty impressive results. What sort of hardware are you running? As my performance test showed, on a single PIII650 I was able to generate on average about 4.5million page hits a day (on a simple login process anyways). -Original Message- From: Holmes, George (TWIi London) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 1:14 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production www.opengolf.com This is the official web site for the British Open Golf tournament. Did 30 million page impressions/day (ish) for the four days of the Open. George GEORGE HOLMES TWI Interactive Media House Burlington Lane LONDON W4 2TH ENGLAND TEL: +44 208 233 5631 FAX: +44 208 233 7701 CELL: +44 7968 918813 -Original Message- From: Juan Lorandi (Chile) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 19 October 2000 22:13 To: Orion-Interest Subject: Orion in production Hi! I have been using orion for about 6 months now, and now, as I'm finishing my app, I need to sell orion to my customers... For this, it would be *VERY* valuable to have a list of sites (on the internet or intranets) which use orion... So, basically, what I have in mind is that anybody on this list that wishes to report a site as being partiallly/fully powered by orion, report it to my email address, [EMAIL PROTECTED], so that I can make a list of these, to publish it on WWW I think this will prove useful for us all. TIA, JP
RE: Orion in production
Thats too bad. If your in a hurry, I can understand, but for what you get, you can't go wrong in my book. It is frustrating at times, but these are the growing pains of small companies too. Good luck with WebLogic or something..it took me 3 weeks to get an email back on one SIMPLE question, and to call them would have cost us over $100 an hour. I tried that..and wasted 2.5 hours waiting on the phone. I won't make that mistake again. To be honest, I really don't think any vendor addresses the needs of support very well. It would be grand if they had 1500 people waiting by phones who were actual developers, knew the low-level technical questions that are often the ones asked, and so on. That just isn't the case in any vendor that I have bought software from. I feel bad for you that your not getting responses, but I doubt you'll get much better support with the $15K per cpu WebLogic or any other vendor. Good luck though. -Original Message- From: Gary Shea [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Sunday, October 22, 2000 8:34 PM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production On Today, Duffey, Kevin ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: I don't think I could say it better myself. I totally agree with you. The fact is, while a few people in the organization I work for believe a small company has little or no support, Magnus, Karl and a number of competent Orion users have given me far better support than I have got from Allaire or BEA..at least 100x better. I mean this. I get answeres EVERY DAY about things I have questions for. I wish I could say the same. I've asked maybe five questions, and received exactly one answer. That one took a week or so. I've basically given up on the support address. And I'm a paying customer! Not too excited about buying any more licenses at this point. Gary Shea iTransact.com, Inc.
RE: Orion in production
On Mon, 23 Oct 2000, Duffey, Kevin wrote: Thats too bad. If your in a hurry, I can understand, but for what you get, you can't go wrong in my book. It is frustrating at times, but these are the growing pains of small companies too. Good luck with WebLogic or something..it took me 3 weeks to get an email back on one SIMPLE question, and to call them would have cost us over $100 an hour. I tried that..and wasted 2.5 hours waiting on the phone. I won't make that mistake again. To be honest, I really don't think any vendor addresses the needs of support very well. It would be grand if they had 1500 people waiting by phones who were actual developers, knew the low-level technical questions that are often the ones asked, and so on. That just isn't the case in any vendor that I have bought software from. I feel bad for you that your not getting responses, but I doubt you'll get much better support with the $15K per cpu WebLogic or any other vendor. Good luck though. I have worked a bit with Unify; they offer pretty good support. Pretty much under one day, continuous developer presence on their newsgroup. I worked with one other J2EE vendor that also gave good support (sorry, forgot their name). Hence my expectations of decent support. I guess if I'd dealt with the ones you have I might not be so shocked! Gary -Original Message- From: Gary Shea [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Sunday, October 22, 2000 8:34 PM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production On Today, Duffey, Kevin ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: I don't think I could say it better myself. I totally agree with you. The fact is, while a few people in the organization I work for believe a small company has little or no support, Magnus, Karl and a number of competent Orion users have given me far better support than I have got from Allaire or BEA..at least 100x better. I mean this. I get answeres EVERY DAY about things I have questions for. I wish I could say the same. I've asked maybe five questions, and received exactly one answer. That one took a week or so. I've basically given up on the support address. And I'm a paying customer! Not too excited about buying any more licenses at this point. Gary Shea iTransact.com, Inc.
Re: Orion in production
On Today, Kyle Cordes ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: often the ones asked, and so on. That just isn't the case in any vendor that I have bought software from. I feel bad for you that your not getting responses, but I doubt you'll get much better support with the $15K per cpu WebLogic or any other vendor. Good luck though. On the other hand, if you call up Orion with a multiple of $15K at your disposal, you could probably arrange a very satisfactory support contract (Just guessing, maybe someone at Orion will state whether support contracts are available.) Kyle Cordes www.kylecordes.com I've approached them about support contracts, but they're looking for external providers, which isn't likely to be all that successful if you ask me, but we'll see. I'd love to pay them for support, but they won't take it. Gary
RE: Orion in production
I wasn't working on the project myself, and possibly gave a slightly mis-leading impression ;- To the best of my knowledge there were 8-12 Dual P3 500, each loaded with all the necessary EJBs, JSPs et al. and load-balanced using BIG IP from F5 Networks. However, none of the boxes were even touched in terms of resource consumption. Apparently, and this is a definite (sic) Windows NT 4/2000 with a dual-processor running Java out-performs a Linux box of the same spec running Java. Originally, the project was trialled to run on Linux, but it was discovered that NT 4 was faster!!! Has anyone else had any experience of this? I was told that it was due to better MP support in NT 4/2000??? George GEORGE HOLMES TWI Interactive Media House Burlington Lane LONDON W4 2TH ENGLAND TEL: +44 208 233 5631 FAX: +44 208 233 7701 CELL: +44 7968 918813 -Original Message- From: Duffey, Kevin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 20 October 2000 19:24 To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production Wow! That's pretty impressive results. What sort of hardware are you running? As my performance test showed, on a single PIII650 I was able to generate on average about 4.5million page hits a day (on a simple login process anyways). -Original Message- From: Holmes, George (TWIi London) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 1:14 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production www.opengolf.com This is the official web site for the British Open Golf tournament. Did 30 million page impressions/day (ish) for the four days of the Open. George GEORGE HOLMES TWI Interactive Media House Burlington Lane LONDON W4 2TH ENGLAND TEL: +44 208 233 5631 FAX: +44 208 233 7701 CELL: +44 7968 918813 -Original Message- From: Juan Lorandi (Chile) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 19 October 2000 22:13 To: Orion-Interest Subject: Orion in production Hi! I have been using orion for about 6 months now, and now, as I'm finishing my app, I need to sell orion to my customers... For this, it would be *VERY* valuable to have a list of sites (on the internet or intranets) which use orion... So, basically, what I have in mind is that anybody on this list that wishes to report a site as being partiallly/fully powered by orion, report it to my email address, [EMAIL PROTECTED], so that I can make a list of these, to publish it on WWW I think this will prove useful for us all. TIA, JP
RE: Orion in production
nt may have better mp support, at least until linux 2.4 comes out officially, but the real issue here is probably the jvm. the jvms in linux just haven't been quite there, and surprisingly microsoft have had the fastest jvms out there for quite some time. in determining whether to run on nt or linux the question for me comes down to reliability. since sp5 nt doesn't slowdown or crash nearly as much as it used to, but i can configure a linux 2.2 box with practically no services on it except the jvm and orion, and it essentially runs well forever (or at least a few months) without trouble. it is still possible to crash nt, and i've even done so with a win2k box. there is usually so much junk on one of those boxes that you cannot get rid of. the new sun linux jvm is much faster than the old blackdown ports, and the inclusion of the hotspot server engine is pretty impressive. we've been running on linux 2-way machines (testing only) for months now--found it fast and never experienced any trouble. i cannot recommend it more.. bradley mclain --- "Holmes, George (TWIi London)" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I wasn't working on the project myself, and possibly gave a slightly mis-leading impression ;- To the best of my knowledge there were 8-12 Dual P3 500, each loaded with all the necessary EJBs, JSPs et al. and load-balanced using BIG IP from F5 Networks. However, none of the boxes were even touched in terms of resource consumption. Apparently, and this is a definite (sic) Windows NT 4/2000 with a dual-processor running Java out-performs a Linux box of the same spec running Java. Originally, the project was trialled to run on Linux, but it was discovered that NT 4 was faster!!! Has anyone else had any experience of this? I was told that it was due to better MP support in NT 4/2000??? George GEORGE HOLMES TWI Interactive Media House Burlington Lane LONDON W4 2TH ENGLAND TEL: +44 208 233 5631 FAX: +44 208 233 7701 CELL: +44 7968 918813 -Original Message- From: Duffey, Kevin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 20 October 2000 19:24 To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production Wow! That's pretty impressive results. What sort of hardware are you running? As my performance test showed, on a single PIII650 I was able to generate on average about 4.5million page hits a day (on a simple login process anyways). -Original Message- From: Holmes, George (TWIi London) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 1:14 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production www.opengolf.com This is the official web site for the British Open Golf tournament. Did 30 million page impressions/day (ish) for the four days of the Open. George GEORGE HOLMES TWI Interactive Media House Burlington Lane LONDON W4 2TH ENGLAND TEL: +44 208 233 5631 FAX: +44 208 233 7701 CELL: +44 7968 918813 -Original Message- From: Juan Lorandi (Chile) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 19 October 2000 22:13 To: Orion-Interest Subject: Orion in production Hi! I have been using orion for about 6 months now, and now, as I'm finishing my app, I need to sell orion to my customers... For this, it would be *VERY* valuable to have a list of sites (on the internet or intranets) which use orion... So, basically, what I have in mind is that anybody on this list that wishes to report a site as being partiallly/fully powered by orion, report it to my email address, [EMAIL PROTECTED], so that I can make a list of these, to publish it on WWW I think this will prove useful for us all. TIA, JP __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Messenger - Talk while you surf! It's FREE. http://im.yahoo.com/
RE: Orion in production
Apparently, and this is a definite (sic) Windows NT 4/2000 with a dual-processor running Java out-performs a Linux box of the same spec running Java. Originally, the project was trialled to run on Linux, but it was discovered that NT 4 was faster!!! Has anyone else had any experience of this? I was told that it was due to better MP support in NT 4/2000??? I have also seen Windows outperform linux when doing Java. I do not think it is the MP code, but rather the JVM which is far better optimised on Windows (especially multithreading is handled more efficiently, which does a lot in server applications). When people say java is faster on linux they invariably talk about IBM 1.3 with Hotspot being faster than 1.2 on Windows without Hotspot. Jeroen T. Wenting [EMAIL PROTECTED] Murphy was wrong, things that can't go wrong will anyway
RE: Orion in production
Hi, Christian I've got the JRun doc set sitting about 10 feet away. iPortal docs are about 20 feet away. Both very nice-looking, I'll grant you that. But in terms of answering concrete, specific questions, they (JRun in particular) didn't strike me (or anyone else here) as being of very much use. I didn't say they were completely useless, but I expected better from an appserver of that price (which for JRun is, of course, still fairly cheap). I find that a lot of the content of documentation from big-league app servers is page after page of how to fill in text fields in GUIs. Sorry, that doesn't cut it. Arved -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Christian Sell Sent: Sunday, October 22, 2000 9:09 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: Re: Orion in production IMHO the docs from the better-known app server vendors are just more pretty. In most cases they aren't actually better. The best docs I've ever seen for applications of this kind are those for open-source CORBA ORBs - ORBacus springs to mind. Maybe Orion can emulate those. I dont know what docs you have been looking at. For me, looking at the JRun 3.0 documentation makes me feel like a desert wanderer hitting an oasis. I think a nicely written, consistent, complete, tutorial-like introduction IS a real value. Now, when relating to the issues covered by the J2EE standard, I can accept that we have the spec and are excpected to read it (thoroughly and completely). But when it comes to server-specific issues, I think full, well-written docs are a must. Also, regarding the pricing issue. I dont think those management types are all that stupid. The fact that a company has 1500 employees, has a huge service force and has been in the business for a decade or more may well be worth a few bucks. Its all a matter of perspective, and there is more than one justified perspective IMO. I as a techie running a small shop am well (somewhat) able to cope with orions deficiencies (only a handful of developers, strange definition of "documentation", etc.) in favor of its qualities. But I do accept that a management type running a 300+ heads shop sees things from a different angle. I thinks it is also fair to reflect that in the pricing..
RE: Orion in production
No offence and thanks very much for the data ... On Monday, October 23, 2000 12:00 PM, Holmes, George (TWIi London) [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: I wasn't working on the project myself, and possibly gave a slightly mis-leading impression ;- To the best of my knowledge there were 8-12 Dual P3 500, each loaded with all the necessary EJBs, JSPs et al. and load-balanced using BIG IP from F5 Networks. However, none of the boxes were even touched in terms of resource consumption. Apparently, and this is a definite (sic) Windows NT 4/2000 with a dual-processor running Java out-performs a Linux box of the same spec running Java. Originally, the project was trialled to run on Linux, but it was discovered that NT 4 was faster!!! Has anyone else had any experience of this? I was told that it was due to better MP support in NT 4/2000??? George GEORGE HOLMES TWI Interactive Media House Burlington Lane LONDON W4 2TH ENGLAND TEL: +44 208 233 5631 FAX: +44 208 233 7701 CELL: +44 7968 918813 -Original Message- From: Duffey, Kevin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 20 October 2000 19:24 To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production Wow! That's pretty impressive results. What sort of hardware are you running? As my performance test showed, on a single PIII650 I was able to generate on average about 4.5million page hits a day (on a simple login process anyways). -Original Message- From: Holmes, George (TWIi London) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 1:14 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production www.opengolf.com This is the official web site for the British Open Golf tournament. Did 30 million page impressions/day (ish) for the four days of the Open. George GEORGE HOLMES TWI Interactive Media House Burlington Lane LONDON W4 2TH ENGLAND TEL: +44 208 233 5631 FAX: +44 208 233 7701 CELL: +44 7968 918813 -Original Message- From: Juan Lorandi (Chile) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 19 October 2000 22:13 To: Orion-Interest Subject: Orion in production Hi! I have been using orion for about 6 months now, and now, as I'm finishing my app, I need to sell orion to my customers... For this, it would be *VERY* valuable to have a list of sites (on the internet or intranets) which use orion... So, basically, what I have in mind is that anybody on this list that wishes to report a site as being partiallly/fully powered by orion, report it to my email address, [EMAIL PROTECTED], so that I can make a list of these, to publish it on WWW I think this will prove useful for us all. TIA, JP
RE: Orion in production
In general the JVM developped by SUN runs substantially quicker on Windows then on Linux. Try for instance to run HypersonicSQL in core on both platforms. As I recall the performance penalty using Linux is reduced using JVM 1.3. Another disadvantage using 1.3 Linux is that the stability of the JVM tends to be less. So much for wining about Java on Linux. The good news is that the platform itself is much more stable. My server only reboots when te power goes down. As far as I know that is still not the case using NT/Win2k. When the JVM goes down in a production environment you can have Linux automagically restart the engine, causing only a small hick-up in your service depending on the startup time of the server. Further more the security of a Linux/UNIX platform is much better, but that is probably not an essential thing when you can only access Orion on the server (and all other access is denied). In that case the security features of Orion should do the trick in general. Depending on the project (and the people to support the systems!) I would choose one or the other. I remember a previous posting with a refrence to JVM benchmarks on the list about it, but I couldn't find it anymore. Frank On Monday, October 23, 2000 12:00 PM, Holmes, George (TWIi London) [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: I wasn't working on the project myself, and possibly gave a slightly mis-leading impression ;- To the best of my knowledge there were 8-12 Dual P3 500, each loaded with all the necessary EJBs, JSPs et al. and load-balanced using BIG IP from F5 Networks. However, none of the boxes were even touched in terms of resource consumption. Apparently, and this is a definite (sic) Windows NT 4/2000 with a dual-processor running Java out-performs a Linux box of the same spec running Java. Originally, the project was trialled to run on Linux, but it was discovered that NT 4 was faster!!! Has anyone else had any experience of this? I was told that it was due to better MP support in NT 4/2000??? George GEORGE HOLMES TWI Interactive Media House Burlington Lane LONDON W4 2TH ENGLAND TEL: +44 208 233 5631 FAX: +44 208 233 7701 CELL: +44 7968 918813 -Original Message- From: Duffey, Kevin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 20 October 2000 19:24 To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production Wow! That's pretty impressive results. What sort of hardware are you running? As my performance test showed, on a single PIII650 I was able to generate on average about 4.5million page hits a day (on a simple login process anyways). -Original Message- From: Holmes, George (TWIi London) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 1:14 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production www.opengolf.com This is the official web site for the British Open Golf tournament. Did 30 million page impressions/day (ish) for the four days of the Open. George GEORGE HOLMES TWI Interactive Media House Burlington Lane LONDON W4 2TH ENGLAND TEL: +44 208 233 5631 FAX: +44 208 233 7701 CELL: +44 7968 918813 -Original Message- From: Juan Lorandi (Chile) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 19 October 2000 22:13 To: Orion-Interest Subject: Orion in production Hi! I have been using orion for about 6 months now, and now, as I'm finishing my app, I need to sell orion to my customers... For this, it would be *VERY* valuable to have a list of sites (on the internet or intranets) which use orion... So, basically, what I have in mind is that anybody on this list that wishes to report a site as being partiallly/fully powered by orion, report it to my email address, [EMAIL PROTECTED], so that I can make a list of these, to publish it on WWW I think this will prove useful for us all. TIA, JP
RE: Orion in production
Indeed with most JVM version the NT/W2K version will be faster than Linux. But now that the 1.3 versions from Sun IBM are out this is no longer true. I now almost exclusively deploy to Linux. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Holmes, George (TWIi London) Sent: Monday, October 23, 2000 6:00 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production I wasn't working on the project myself, and possibly gave a slightly mis-leading impression ;- To the best of my knowledge there were 8-12 Dual P3 500, each loaded with all the necessary EJBs, JSPs et al. and load-balanced using BIG IP from F5 Networks. However, none of the boxes were even touched in terms of resource consumption. Apparently, and this is a definite (sic) Windows NT 4/2000 with a dual-processor running Java out-performs a Linux box of the same spec running Java. Originally, the project was trialled to run on Linux, but it was discovered that NT 4 was faster!!! Has anyone else had any experience of this? I was told that it was due to better MP support in NT 4/2000??? George GEORGE HOLMES TWI Interactive Media House Burlington Lane LONDON W4 2TH ENGLAND TEL: +44 208 233 5631 FAX: +44 208 233 7701 CELL: +44 7968 918813 -Original Message- From: Duffey, Kevin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 20 October 2000 19:24 To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production Wow! That's pretty impressive results. What sort of hardware are you running? As my performance test showed, on a single PIII650 I was able to generate on average about 4.5million page hits a day (on a simple login process anyways). -Original Message- From: Holmes, George (TWIi London) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 1:14 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production www.opengolf.com This is the official web site for the British Open Golf tournament. Did 30 million page impressions/day (ish) for the four days of the Open. George GEORGE HOLMES TWI Interactive Media House Burlington Lane LONDON W4 2TH ENGLAND TEL: +44 208 233 5631 FAX: +44 208 233 7701 CELL: +44 7968 918813 -Original Message- From: Juan Lorandi (Chile) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 19 October 2000 22:13 To: Orion-Interest Subject: Orion in production Hi! I have been using orion for about 6 months now, and now, as I'm finishing my app, I need to sell orion to my customers... For this, it would be *VERY* valuable to have a list of sites (on the internet or intranets) which use orion... So, basically, what I have in mind is that anybody on this list that wishes to report a site as being partiallly/fully powered by orion, report it to my email address, [EMAIL PROTECTED], so that I can make a list of these, to publish it on WWW I think this will prove useful for us all. TIA, JP
RE: Orion in production
snip/ I remember a previous posting with a refrence to JVM benchmarks on the list about it, but I couldn't find it anymore. http://www.volano.com/report.html you see that speed is not so much an issue rather than scalability. for many people's requirements, however, I don't think those problems are relevant (how many of us have 2000 concurrent connections?). we haven't had any serious problems with sun1.3 on linux (hot spot server) and it's really fast enough. I'll gladly trade 5% speed penalty for the overall stability, maintainability and flexibility of a linux server as a deployment platform. robert Frank (-) 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: Orion in production - Let's sell support!
However, you say that you have not bought a license yet and that means you have not yet bought any support from us. If you are serious in choosing Orion I think it can actually save you money to get a license when developing (even if you can get free developer licenses), since it will mean you get better support from us. This is just wrong. I would expect to have full documentation (via pdf, whatever) _before_ my company buys the product. I would want to be able to code a complete proof-of-concept project and test it _before_ shelling out money. Just my opinion, -tim
RE: Orion in production
Does anybody have any definitive numbers on this? What about Volano? I typically have found that for small-scale applications, I often get faster performance with the Windows JVMs (much to my chagrin ;^). For example, I almost never run Forte CE under Linux or even Solaris. It's not until you really start cranking up the application that you start to see a difference, in terms of performance under high loads and scalability. As far as Linux and Java 2 goes, Sun's 1.3 implementation was the first real performer, although it looks like Blackdown's beta appears to be giving Sun a run for its money (especially with AWT and Swing applications - Blackdown wins, hands-down). Even though IBM looks like it has another performance leader in its 1.3 implementation, it looks rather buggy and unstable at this point. Thoughts? -Rich --- Russ White [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Indeed with most JVM version the NT/W2K version will be faster than Linux. But now that the 1.3 versions from Sun IBM are out this is no longer true. I now almost exclusively deploy to Linux. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Holmes, George (TWIi London) Sent: Monday, October 23, 2000 6:00 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production I wasn't working on the project myself, and possibly gave a slightly mis-leading impression ;- To the best of my knowledge there were 8-12 Dual P3 500, each loaded with all the necessary EJBs, JSPs et al. and load-balanced using BIG IP from F5 Networks. However, none of the boxes were even touched in terms of resource consumption. Apparently, and this is a definite (sic) Windows NT 4/2000 with a dual-processor running Java out-performs a Linux box of the same spec running Java. Originally, the project was trialled to run on Linux, but it was discovered that NT 4 was faster!!! Has anyone else had any experience of this? I was told that it was due to better MP support in NT 4/2000??? George GEORGE HOLMES TWI Interactive Media House Burlington Lane LONDON W4 2TH ENGLAND TEL: +44 208 233 5631 FAX: +44 208 233 7701 CELL: +44 7968 918813 -Original Message- From: Duffey, Kevin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 20 October 2000 19:24 To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production Wow! That's pretty impressive results. What sort of hardware are you running? As my performance test showed, on a single PIII650 I was able to generate on average about 4.5million page hits a day (on a simple login process anyways). -Original Message- From: Holmes, George (TWIi London) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 1:14 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production www.opengolf.com This is the official web site for the British Open Golf tournament. Did 30 million page impressions/day (ish) for the four days of the Open. George GEORGE HOLMES TWI Interactive Media House Burlington Lane LONDON W4 2TH ENGLAND TEL: +44 208 233 5631 FAX: +44 208 233 7701 CELL: +44 7968 918813 -Original Message- From: Juan Lorandi (Chile) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 19 October 2000 22:13 To: Orion-Interest Subject: Orion in production Hi! I have been using orion for about 6 months now, and now, as I'm finishing my app, I need to sell orion to my customers... For this, it would be *VERY* valuable to have a list of sites (on the internet or intranets) which use orion... So, basically, what I have in mind is that anybody on this list that wishes to report a site as being partiallly/fully powered by orion, report it to my email address, [EMAIL PROTECTED], so that I can make a list of these, to publish it on WWW I think this will prove useful for us all. TIA, JP = Richard E. Sansom [EMAIL PROTECTED] __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Messenger - Talk while you surf! It's FREE. http://im.yahoo.com/
RE: Orion in production - Let's sell support!
Tim has brought up an interesting point. Orion has granted free licenses to developers, which is a good concept. However, Orion not only has to compete with other commercial products like web-logic, but good open source EJB servers, like JBoss and JOnAS. It would only be fair to have good documentation to review, and to deploy a test sample to demonstrate Orion can work, for those funding the development and software purchases. -Original Message- From: Tim Drury [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, October 23, 2000 9:10 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production - Let's sell support! However, you say that you have not bought a license yet and that means you have not yet bought any support from us. If you are serious in choosing Orion I think it can actually save you money to get a license when developing (even if you can get free developer licenses), since it will mean you get better support from us. This is just wrong. I would expect to have full documentation (via pdf, whatever) _before_ my company buys the product. I would want to be able to code a complete proof-of-concept project and test it _before_ shelling out money. Just my opinion, -tim
Re: Orion in production
Hmm, I am still left wondering.. Maybe we have read different parts of the Jrun specs (ver. 3.0, yes?). I can still very well remember how I struggled with the authentication mechanism (principals.xml, etc.) for several days until I finally came across the JRun manuals. The "developing applications with JRun" PDF has 16 pages on authentication, including 5 pages on "controlling the server authentication mechanism". None of that is GUI field instructions (at best, its property files description). Those chapters are the only ones I have read, but still.. I thought I had to add this. Now, I will stop advertising JRun on this list. (BTW, according to the saying "I post, therefore I am" I _am_ on this list as much as anyone else). -Original Message- From: Arved Sandstrom [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Orion-Interest [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Montag, 23. Oktober 2000 17:02 Subject: RE: Orion in production Hi, Christian I've got the JRun doc set sitting about 10 feet away. iPortal docs are about 20 feet away. Both very nice-looking, I'll grant you that. But in terms of answering concrete, specific questions, they (JRun in particular) didn't strike me (or anyone else here) as being of very much use. I didn't say they were completely useless, but I expected better from an appserver of that price (which for JRun is, of course, still fairly cheap). I find that a lot of the content of documentation from big-league app servers is page after page of how to fill in text fields in GUIs. Sorry, that doesn't cut it. Arved -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Christian Sell Sent: Sunday, October 22, 2000 9:09 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: Re: Orion in production IMHO the docs from the better-known app server vendors are just more pretty. In most cases they aren't actually better. The best docs I've ever seen for applications of this kind are those for open-source CORBA ORBs - ORBacus springs to mind. Maybe Orion can emulate those. I dont know what docs you have been looking at. For me, looking at the JRun 3.0 documentation makes me feel like a desert wanderer hitting an oasis. I think a nicely written, consistent, complete, tutorial-like introduction IS a real value. Now, when relating to the issues covered by the J2EE standard, I can accept that we have the spec and are excpected to read it (thoroughly and completely). But when it comes to server-specific issues, I think full, well-written docs are a must. Also, regarding the pricing issue. I dont think those management types are all that stupid. The fact that a company has 1500 employees, has a huge service force and has been in the business for a decade or more may well be worth a few bucks. Its all a matter of perspective, and there is more than one justified perspective IMO. I as a techie running a small shop am well (somewhat) able to cope with orions deficiencies (only a handful of developers, strange definition of "documentation", etc.) in favor of its qualities. But I do accept that a management type running a 300+ heads shop sees things from a different angle. I thinks it is also fair to reflect that in the pricing..
RE: Orion in production - Let's sell support!
On Today, Kemp Randy-W18971 ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Tim has brought up an interesting point. Orion has granted free licenses to developers, which is a good concept. However, Orion not only has to compete with other commercial products like web-logic, but good open source EJB servers, like JBoss and JOnAS. It would only be fair to have good documentation to review, and to deploy a test sample to demonstrate Orion can work, for those funding the development and software purchases. We bought a copy of Orion for development, figuring that given the low price and the supposed availability of support for license holders, it would be worth the cost. Unfortunately, we have received zero useful support from Orion at this point. I'm trying to figure out if I've simply asked lousy/dumb questions, or if there really is zero support. Kinda hard to tell... Documenting something as complex as a J2EE server must be a daunting task, and I can't blame Orion for having trouble doing it. And even email support eats time like crazy. I suppose that's why it costs so much to buy the upscale servers, because they have the resources to provide documentation and real support. I still plan on working with Orion as long as I can stand the pain and can accomplish the job. I'm sure not tying myself to it though, knowing that any day I can run into a problem for which I might never find an answer. At that point we'll be forced to shovel out the bucks for a more customer-friendly server. Ah well, Gary Shea iTransact.com, Inc.
Re: Orion in production
IMHO the docs from the better-known app server vendors are just more pretty. In most cases they aren't actually better. The best docs I've ever seen for applications of this kind are those for open-source CORBA ORBs - ORBacus springs to mind. Maybe Orion can emulate those. I dont know what docs you have been looking at. For me, looking at the JRun 3.0 documentation makes me feel like a desert wanderer hitting an oasis. I think a nicely written, consistent, complete, tutorial-like introduction IS a real value. Now, when relating to the issues covered by the J2EE standard, I can accept that we have the spec and are excpected to read it (thoroughly and completely). But when it comes to server-specific issues, I think full, well-written docs are a must. Also, regarding the pricing issue. I dont think those management types are all that stupid. The fact that a company has 1500 employees, has a huge service force and has been in the business for a decade or more may well be worth a few bucks. Its all a matter of perspective, and there is more than one justified perspective IMO. I as a techie running a small shop am well (somewhat) able to cope with orions deficiencies (only a handful of developers, strange definition of "documentation", etc.) in favor of its qualities. But I do accept that a management type running a 300+ heads shop sees things from a different angle. I thinks it is also fair to reflect that in the pricing..
RE: Orion in production
I don't think I could say it better myself. I totally agree with you. The fact is, while a few people in the organization I work for believe a small company has little or no support, Magnus, Karl and a number of competent Orion users have given me far better support than I have got from Allaire or BEA..at least 100x better. I mean this. I get answeres EVERY DAY about things I have questions for. Not only was BEA slow in responding (over 1 week), but the people they have their answering questions, first of all are not the developers, second of all don't know the product very well, and third..those that know it can only explain the "basic" things. Technical questions seem to elude all but the developers of BEA and you can't talk to them directly. -Original Message- From: Sven van 't Veer [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 2:29 PM To: Orion-Interest Subject: Re: Orion in production "Duffey, Kevin" wrote: easiest to set up. I played around with WebLogic for two weeks (on and off) and still couldn't get my simple JSP page to show up. WebSphere was a nightmare, and while Resin was easy to work with, its not a full J2EE app server. IBM WebSphere..about a year late for the full J2EE support. I can't even believe IBM WebSphere still doesn't support Servlet 2.2 and JSP 1.1! I don't care how many billions you put into your software..if it doesn't even meet the standards that have been in place for almost a year now..it sure doesn't say a lot to me that the money is being spent in the right places! Meanwhile, you have little itty bitty Orion (Ok..they are big to me! ;) over here support EJB 2.0, Servlet 2.3, full J2EE support, clusterable, easy to set up, fast, etc.. I sound like I am a sales man for Orion, but you know..I tend to read up and test alot of the latest stuff and Orion kicks the competitions ass hands down. AFIK Orion is a very small company, only a hand full of people which is great. IMHO lagre companies waste a lof of time and money on meetings and stuff like that which is really bad for productions. Before starting for myself I worked in a couple of those and, eventhough the salary is generally very good the working climate sucks. I hate meetings, 90 % of the time is wasted discussing off-topic issues. The company I worked for had about 50 developers working which isn't even that big (considering Weblogic witb it's 1500). Every day started with a staff meeting of one hour with the section heads and one hour of the section heads with all the section members, resulting in about man hours lost per section per day. If there is anything that makes small companies great, it's their agility. Orion has already implemented mos t of the EJB 2.0 specs while weblogin has just launched it's fully 1.1 compliant server. I'd take Orion over any othjer server, and not only because of it's price, but because it seems there are some really competent people working on this server. sven -- == Sven E. van 't Veer http://www.cachoeiro.net Java Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] ==
RE: Orion in production
Hi, One thing we'll probably end up doing is getting a pricey app server so we can tell outside folks we have it, and then continue using Orion so that we can assure ourselves that things will work. Seems stupid, but that's the way things are. Thats a good ideas as long as they don't use any netcraft website style stuff..where they can enter a domain name and see the server and version info! :) One valid concern our business folks have is, "what is Orion's future?" _I_ don't know where they stand from a business viewpoint (revenue, profits, business plan) and so it's really tough to know whether they'll be around in a year. What's to stop them being bought out? For this reason we'll end up using Orion in production to some degree, but we'll also have a shiny stand-by app server migration plan, JIC. That is a concern of ours as well. I am hoping with WebLogic 6.0 I can easily move our app from Orion to WebLogic so that I can "prove" to my boss that its moveable. I have experienced the same pains you have..in that while our app is fully Java (and hopefully soon J2EE), it doesn't seem to be easily moveable as once thought. I think its probably 99% server related..I haven't had to change any code to run on different servers. But it does require some tweaking, and I have yet to move my Orion app successfully to WebLogic. I think that is because WebLogic is far from implementing J2EE as Orion has. (Pretty sad when you compare the small team of Orion compared to the large team of developers WebLogic has).
RE: Orion in production - new howto
I've just added a new HowTo to orionsupport.com. Details one approach to running Orion securely on UNIX/Linux. Also includes a useful shell script for administering Orion with. http://www.orionsupport.com/articles/unixprocess.html This is just one way of securing Orion... as Mike said, we'd love to hear how others approached the problem. -Joe Walnes -- At 05:28 22/10/2000, Mike Cannon-Brookes wrote -- This sounds fascinating - I'd love to know more about *ix permissions, securing Orion properly etc. You sound like you've got it all down pat, if you wouldn't mind, I'd love to learn more about your setup - as I'm sure other Orion users would. How about writing a quick how to doc about securing Orion on *ix? The OrionSupport team will love you for it ;)
RE: Orion in production
On Today, Duffey, Kevin ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: I don't think I could say it better myself. I totally agree with you. The fact is, while a few people in the organization I work for believe a small company has little or no support, Magnus, Karl and a number of competent Orion users have given me far better support than I have got from Allaire or BEA..at least 100x better. I mean this. I get answeres EVERY DAY about things I have questions for. I wish I could say the same. I've asked maybe five questions, and received exactly one answer. That one took a week or so. I've basically given up on the support address. And I'm a paying customer! Not too excited about buying any more licenses at this point. Gary Shea iTransact.com, Inc.
RE: Orion in production
I agree that sometimes support can be lacking, but I've worked out the key - specific questions! I find if I send them a specific question (usually with a working example I'll whip up), they can deploy it and get an answer to me quite quickly (1-2 days). If you ask a vague question like "How do JNDI bindings work in local apps?" it generally doesn't illicit a response ;) Just my experiences, Mike -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Gary Shea Sent: Monday, October 23, 2000 1:34 PM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production On Today, Duffey, Kevin ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: I don't think I could say it better myself. I totally agree with you. The fact is, while a few people in the organization I work for believe a small company has little or no support, Magnus, Karl and a number of competent Orion users have given me far better support than I have got from Allaire or BEA..at least 100x better. I mean this. I get answeres EVERY DAY about things I have questions for. I wish I could say the same. I've asked maybe five questions, and received exactly one answer. That one took a week or so. I've basically given up on the support address. And I'm a paying customer! Not too excited about buying any more licenses at this point. Gary Shea iTransact.com, Inc.
Re: Orion in production - Let's sell support!
Hello Jim, Couldn't agree more on the business plans. We are looking for partners to do support for money, if you're interested and your company has Orion knowledge, we'd be very happy to help you "officially" to get customers. However, you say that you have not bought a license yet and that means you have not yet bought any support from us. If you are serious in choosing Orion I think it can actually save you money to get a license when developing (even if you can get free developer licenses), since it will mean you get better support from us. However, the support you get for $1500 is, needless to say, limited. We can't put 100 hours into giving you support at that price and still have money left to develop the product. So we are going to provide more generous support at a higher price, both ourselves and through partners. We are speaking with multiple possible partners about outsourcing support and selling support packages and if you are interested or know someone who is interested in selling support and make decent money from it, feel free to contact us. Regards, Karl Avedal Jim Archer wrote: Hello all... --On Friday, October 20, 2000 5:35 PM -0300 "Juan Lorandi (Chile)" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And also, lack of support documentation is becoming now, as most developers are finishing their work and reach deployment time(from what I pick up of many mails in this list), a critical point about orion. Many of us are reaching the point where we have to prove no only that orion's the best, but that it also is a good business choice. This is unfairly hard due to little colaboration from Evermind's team regarding, as said, support documentation, tough it clearly seems to be changing. This is a key issue. There is an old saying that time is money. Not true in software. Time is far more valuable than money. Money can be raised but time can not. Orion is reasonably priced for the product itself. However, if using Orion means a lot of trial and error development and no official support from the vendor, the costs in extra consumption of developers time and oppertunity loss from delayed market entry could easily exceed the price tag of Weblogic. Don't get me wrong, I like Orion. I like it alot. Currently, our intention is to complete development on it and then license it and deploy with it and hopefully sell it with our product. This goal would be one heck of a lot easier to obtain if we had official support from the vendor. Right now, there are people here banging their heads on the wall just trying to guess at what works and what dossen't, whats implemented and whats not. It's tireing. Anybody want to help me start a business selling Orion support on a 900 number? Just charge several dollars a minute, on an incident by incident basis. If the support is competant, it would sell big. Heck, we could make more money then Evermind! Big Grin OK, just kidding, but this is a serious issue. Jim
RE: Orion in production
Biggest problems with Orion, as I see them: lack of US support base and representation (many companies don't like to write foreign purchase orders, and local training is an issue even though Orion supports standards better than its competitors), and documentation, with documentation being a MUCH smaller issue than communication with local support. On Fri, 20 Oct 2000, Juan Lorandi (Chile) wrote: I completly agree with your posts, but I beg I'm allowed to differ in one thing... Big Companies don't make enterprises like Evermind or BEA Systems rich... directly... But these BIG names make for BIG hype... as you're well aware of; That's why your boss thinks Weblogic is the way to go... That's why I have requested data to make the OPS list... And also, lack of support documentation is becoming now, as most developers are finishing their work and reach deployment time(from what I pick up of many mails in this list), a critical point about orion. Many of us are reaching the point where we have to prove no only that orion's the best, but that it also is a good business choice. This is unfairly hard due to little colaboration from Evermind's team regarding, as said, support documentation, tough it clearly seems to be changing. Perhaps its time for a change(and I hope it's a change that will keep my sorry a~s working with Orion ;-) JP -Original Message- From: Duffey, Kevin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Viernes, 20 de Octubre de 2000 16:27 To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production Importance: High I would like to ammend my previous post. I don't actually know if Orion has marketing/publicity, and I am not in a position to say they are just starting out. I apologize if I spoke with my head up my rear..I believe my intention was to hype up Orion for all the hard work the team has done to give us a great product, not to make it sound like they are a small company. My point being, I had a very difficult time getting my boss to go with Orion over WebLogic, and even so he still wants to use WebLogic, we just don't want to spend the money right now. Alot of companies for some reason feel the name is bigger than the actual work behind it. It sucks..but that appears to be the way alot of business run. When you have a VC give you $72 million as we have received in the past year, its hard to use a product nobody is familiar with, over one that is touted the best, even if the price costs 10 to 20 times more. I of all people have had a hard time trying to understand why our company would want to waste so much money on a proudct that isn't even on par with the standards (as they claim to be) as Orion is. Anyways..Just wanted to clear that up incase I got some people thinking Orion is small. In actuality, they are big, and they will get bigger! -Original Message- From: Duffey, Kevin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 12:05 PM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production I would say..Orion has almost no publicity other than word of mouth right now. Orion is just starting out compared to WebLogic, IIS, and what not. Give them some time..people are reluctant to turn to a small company with such a cheap price. I hate to say it, and I hope they don't change their price, but believe it or not, if Orion raised its license price to say $10,000 per server (hopefully not cpu), they might actually get more interest. I think there is still a lot of testing and what not to do before they should do that, if they even want to. Quite frankly, I like what they are doing. They offer a kick-ass server for a affordable price..very good for small to medium sized companies to use. There are a LOT more small to medium sized companies than big companies, so even if they are 1/10th the price (or 1/40th if you compare 4 cpu servers), I would be that the Orion team will see a lot of sales in the small/medium market, which could actually give them alot more money in the bank. On top of that, I don't know how many people Orion employs, but I know WebLogic is over 1500 people, large facility, etc. WebLogic spends a hell of a lot more on salaries, travel expenses, marketing, etc. In my opinion..maybe its just me, but I trust Orion or Apache over the big names. Plus..as I said, I can't start up my own company using WebLogic. I can with Orion. Better yet, Orion has thus far beat the hell out of every major (and as far as I can tell..every small) vendor of app servers (J2EE supporters I should say) as far as staying ahead of the ballgame, offering great performance, the best J2EE support, and the easiest to set up. I played around with WebLogic for two weeks (on and off) and still couldn't get my simple JSP page to show up. WebSphere was a nightmare, and while Resin was easy to work with, its not a full J2EE app
RE: Orion in production
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
Re: Orion in production
I have to agree with Robert. (with the same caveat, I think Orion is a great product We even recommended it to some clients who wanted a J2EE solution without the cost of BEA or Netscape) There are some things that right now I don't feel comfortable with in it though. Clustering... Clustering is just downright a pain in Orion :) I would love to see something like IPlanet 6's control panel to control clustering and failover. Deployment... Deployment is not terribly difficult if you know what you are doing, but my last project had us using IPlanet 6 and I had developers who had never deployed J2EE apps able to deploy them easily using their deployment tool. It took minimal training for the front end guys to get them trained to use it, and deploy the application without having to come to me for help. That would be nice and is a step closer with the console now in Orion. Pricing is very nice, but believe it or not we have had clients bow out of Orion based on it being too inexpensive. I know that is terrible, but for some reason some clients seem to equate big bucks with maturity and reliability. You wont find me complaining though, heck where else is there a free for development commercial server? Al - Original Message - From: "Robert Krueger" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "Orion-Interest" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, October 21, 2000 3:19 PM Subject: RE: Orion in production 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 Informa
RE: Orion in production
Robert, I agree with some of your points, and I have a 'semi' solution that I've told Magnus about before. The autoupdate tool is brilliant, but too addictive. Sometimes I've updated to get fixes for bugs, only to get another version with a different annoying bug. If it had the option to autoupdate to the latest 'stable' version, or the latest 'rough edged' version, it would be perfect. eg java -jar autoupdate.jar -version=stable / development Oh, and to Al who says he can't see Orion because it's too inexpensive? Just tell the client it's $10k, bill 'em $10k and they'll love you for it - oh, and either pocket the $8.5k or donate it to the Orion guys, I'm sure they wouldn't knock you back ;) Mike -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Robert Krueger Sent: Sunday, October 22, 2000 5:19 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production 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
Re: Orion in production
lol. What a concept. But we would have to charge 20 or 30 K... of course :) Hey *I* see it, our clients seem to equate inexpensive with "not ready for prime time" Al - Original Message - From: "Mike Cannon-Brookes" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "Orion-Interest" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, October 21, 2000 10:09 PM Subject: RE: Orion in production Robert, I agree with some of your points, and I have a 'semi' solution that I've told Magnus about before. The autoupdate tool is brilliant, but too addictive. Sometimes I've updated to get fixes for bugs, only to get another version with a different annoying bug. If it had the option to autoupdate to the latest 'stable' version, or the latest 'rough edged' version, it would be perfect. eg java -jar autoupdate.jar -version=stable / development Oh, and to Al who says he can't see Orion because it's too inexpensive? Just tell the client it's $10k, bill 'em $10k and they'll love you for it - oh, and either pocket the $8.5k or donate it to the Orion guys, I'm sure they wouldn't knock you back ;) Mike -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Robert Krueger Sent: Sunday, October 22, 2000 5:19 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production 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 - 64
RE: Orion in production - autoupdate tool
This sounds fascinating - I'd love to know more about *ix permissions, securing Orion properly etc. You sound like you've got it all down pat, if you wouldn't mind, I'd love to learn more about your setup - as I'm sure other Orion users would. How about writing a quick how to doc about securing Orion on *ix? The OrionSupport team will love you for it ;) Mike -Original Message- From: Jim Archer [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Sunday, October 22, 2000 1:18 PM To: Orion-Interest Cc: Mike Cannon-Brookes Subject: RE: Orion in production - autoupdate tool Actually, I'm not sure the auto-update tool is very usefull at all in production. For security reasons, we don't allow Orion write access to itself. If we configure our operating system to allow Orion to over write its own code files, we create a serious security hole. A hacker may discover an exploit in Orion that gets it to change its files and open a security hole. If Orion can't write to itself, this can't happen. Configuring an app like a web server to not have write access to itself is security measure number 1. Jim --On Sunday, October 22, 2000 12:09 PM +1000 Mike Cannon-Brookes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Robert, I agree with some of your points, and I have a 'semi' solution that I've told Magnus about before. The autoupdate tool is brilliant, but too addictive. Sometimes I've updated to get fixes for bugs, only to get another version with a different annoying bug. If it had the option to autoupdate to the latest 'stable' version, or the latest 'rough edged' version, it would be perfect. eg java -jar autoupdate.jar -version=stable / development Oh, and to Al who says he can't see Orion because it's too inexpensive? Just tell the client it's $10k, bill 'em $10k and they'll love you for it - oh, and either pocket the $8.5k or donate it to the Orion guys, I'm sure they wouldn't knock you back ;) Mike -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Robert Krueger Sent: Sunday, October 22, 2000 5:19 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production 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
RE: Orion in production - autoupdate tool
I would love to take credit, but one of the guys I work with is an expert in this field and he has been working on securing Orion on a Debian Linux server. I'll see if I can get him to write up a little doc on this, but unfortunatly we have not got it working properly yet. When we remove Orion's permission to write to itself, we find thst it is no longer able to make the JSP cache files when a JSP is run for the first time. This is odd, since we moved them and granted Orion permission to write to them, so this should not fail. We sent some questions off to Orion, but have not heard back yet. So for now, we are running it unsecure in test mode. We really can't deploy like that, so it is being worked on. When we figure out what the heck is going on, we'll do as you request, gladly. We have received a lot of help from this list and so we'll be happy to give back. However, I doid post a long note from my friend describing the some problems and solutions, except for that last one. I'll see if I can hunt it down and forward it to you. Jim Jim --On Sunday, October 22, 2000 2:28 PM +1000 Mike Cannon-Brookes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This sounds fascinating - I'd love to know more about *ix permissions, securing Orion properly etc. You sound like you've got it all down pat, if you wouldn't mind, I'd love to learn more about your setup - as I'm sure other Orion users would. How about writing a quick how to doc about securing Orion on *ix? The OrionSupport team will love you for it ;) Mike -Original Message- From: Jim Archer [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Sunday, October 22, 2000 1:18 PM To: Orion-Interest Cc: Mike Cannon-Brookes Subject: RE: Orion in production - autoupdate tool Actually, I'm not sure the auto-update tool is very usefull at all in production. For security reasons, we don't allow Orion write access to itself. If we configure our operating system to allow Orion to over write its own code files, we create a serious security hole. A hacker may discover an exploit in Orion that gets it to change its files and open a security hole. If Orion can't write to itself, this can't happen. Configuring an app like a web server to not have write access to itself is security measure number 1. Jim --On Sunday, October 22, 2000 12:09 PM +1000 Mike Cannon-Brookes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Robert, I agree with some of your points, and I have a 'semi' solution that I've told Magnus about before. The autoupdate tool is brilliant, but too addictive. Sometimes I've updated to get fixes for bugs, only to get another version with a different annoying bug. If it had the option to autoupdate to the latest 'stable' version, or the latest 'rough edged' version, it would be perfect. eg java -jar autoupdate.jar -version=stable / development Oh, and to Al who says he can't see Orion because it's too inexpensive? Just tell the client it's $10k, bill 'em $10k and they'll love you for it - oh, and either pocket the $8.5k or donate it to the Orion guys, I'm sure they wouldn't knock you back ;) Mike -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Robert Krueger Sent: Sunday, October 22, 2000 5:19 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production 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
RE: Orion in production
www.opengolf.com This is the official web site for the British Open Golf tournament. Did 30 million page impressions/day (ish) for the four days of the Open. George GEORGE HOLMES TWI Interactive Media House Burlington Lane LONDON W4 2TH ENGLAND TEL: +44 208 233 5631 FAX: +44 208 233 7701 CELL: +44 7968 918813 -Original Message- From: Juan Lorandi (Chile) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 19 October 2000 22:13 To: Orion-Interest Subject: Orion in production Hi! I have been using orion for about 6 months now, and now, as I'm finishing my app, I need to sell orion to my customers... For this, it would be *VERY* valuable to have a list of sites (on the internet or intranets) which use orion... So, basically, what I have in mind is that anybody on this list that wishes to report a site as being partiallly/fully powered by orion, report it to my email address, [EMAIL PROTECTED], so that I can make a list of these, to publish it on WWW I think this will prove useful for us all. TIA, JP
RE: Orion in production
Sorry, site was running on NT4 using Sun JDK 1.3 George GEORGE HOLMES TWI Interactive Media House Burlington Lane LONDON W4 2TH ENGLAND TEL: +44 208 233 5631 FAX: +44 208 233 7701 CELL: +44 7968 918813 -Original Message- From: Holmes, George (TWIi London) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 20 October 2000 09:14 To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production www.opengolf.com This is the official web site for the British Open Golf tournament. Did 30 million page impressions/day (ish) for the four days of the Open. George GEORGE HOLMES TWI Interactive Media House Burlington Lane LONDON W4 2TH ENGLAND TEL: +44 208 233 5631 FAX: +44 208 233 7701 CELL: +44 7968 918813 -Original Message- From: Juan Lorandi (Chile) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 19 October 2000 22:13 To: Orion-Interest Subject: Orion in production Hi! I have been using orion for about 6 months now, and now, as I'm finishing my app, I need to sell orion to my customers... For this, it would be *VERY* valuable to have a list of sites (on the internet or intranets) which use orion... So, basically, what I have in mind is that anybody on this list that wishes to report a site as being partiallly/fully powered by orion, report it to my email address, [EMAIL PROTECTED], so that I can make a list of these, to publish it on WWW I think this will prove useful for us all. TIA, JP
RE: Orion in production
At 10:00 20.10.00 , you wrote: Sorry, site was running on NT4 using Sun JDK 1.3 good point (including the jdk in the list) the redbull sites run sun jdk1.3 release hotspot server version robert George GEORGE HOLMES TWI Interactive Media House Burlington Lane LONDON W4 2TH ENGLAND TEL: +44 208 233 5631 FAX: +44 208 233 7701 CELL: +44 7968 918813 -Original Message- From: Holmes, George (TWIi London) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 20 October 2000 09:14 To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production www.opengolf.com This is the official web site for the British Open Golf tournament. Did 30 million page impressions/day (ish) for the four days of the Open. George GEORGE HOLMES TWI Interactive Media House Burlington Lane LONDON W4 2TH ENGLAND TEL: +44 208 233 5631 FAX: +44 208 233 7701 CELL: +44 7968 918813 -Original Message- From: Juan Lorandi (Chile) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 19 October 2000 22:13 To: Orion-Interest Subject: Orion in production Hi! I have been using orion for about 6 months now, and now, as I'm finishing my app, I need to sell orion to my customers... For this, it would be *VERY* valuable to have a list of sites (on the internet or intranets) which use orion... So, basically, what I have in mind is that anybody on this list that wishes to report a site as being partiallly/fully powered by orion, report it to my email address, [EMAIL PROTECTED], so that I can make a list of these, to publish it on WWW I think this will prove useful for us all. TIA, JP (-) 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: Orion in production
"Juan Lorandi (Chile)" wrote: Hi! I have been using orion for about 6 months now, and now, as I'm finishing my app, I need to sell orion to my customers... For this, it would be *VERY* valuable to have a list of sites (on the internet or intranets) which use orion... So, basically, what I have in mind is that anybody on this list that wishes to report a site as being partiallly/fully powered by orion, report it to my email address, [EMAIL PROTECTED], so that I can make a list of these, to publish it on WWW I think this will prove useful for us all. www.cachoeiro.net www.snpc.com.br -- == Sven E. van 't Veer http://www.cachoeiro.net Java Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] ==
RE: Orion in production
As of interest. What sort of configuration were the running? Frank On Friday, October 20, 2000 10:14 AM, Holmes, George (TWIi London) [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: www.opengolf.com This is the official web site for the British Open Golf tournament. Did 30 million page impressions/day (ish) for the four days of the Open. George GEORGE HOLMES TWI Interactive Media House Burlington Lane LONDON W4 2TH ENGLAND TEL: +44 208 233 5631 FAX: +44 208 233 7701 CELL: +44 7968 918813 -Original Message- From: Juan Lorandi (Chile) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 19 October 2000 22:13 To: Orion-Interest Subject: Orion in production Hi! I have been using orion for about 6 months now, and now, as I'm finishing my app, I need to sell orion to my customers... For this, it would be *VERY* valuable to have a list of sites (on the internet or intranets) which use orion... So, basically, what I have in mind is that anybody on this list that wishes to report a site as being partiallly/fully powered by orion, report it to my email address, [EMAIL PROTECTED], so that I can make a list of these, to publish it on WWW I think this will prove useful for us all. TIA, JP
RE: Orion in production
I don't know what's the downside of believing these statistics. On http://www.netcraft.com: click on 'what's that site running' click on 'help' click on 'range' click on 'Index' (of Sept 2000 of course) Hit Ctrl-F and search for orion. It tells you 1238 servers are running orion. (If you want your boss to go ahead with orion, don't show him number 5 on the list!) Frank On Friday, October 20, 2000 12:38 PM, Sven van 't Veer [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: "Juan Lorandi (Chile)" wrote: Hi! I have been using orion for about 6 months now, and now, as I'm finishing my app, I need to sell orion to my customers... For this, it would be *VERY* valuable to have a list of sites (on the internet or intranets) which use orion... So, basically, what I have in mind is that anybody on this list that wishes to report a site as being partiallly/fully powered by orion, report it to my email address, [EMAIL PROTECTED], so that I can make a list of these, to publish it on WWW I think this will prove useful for us all. www.cachoeiro.net www.snpc.com.br -- == Sven E. van 't Veer http://www.cachoeiro.net Java Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] ==
RE: Orion in production
Very narrow range of top-level domains. No European or Asian domains at all... -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Frank Eggink Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 14:09 To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production I don't know what's the downside of believing these statistics. On http://www.netcraft.com: click on 'what's that site running' click on 'help' click on 'range' click on 'Index' (of Sept 2000 of course) Hit Ctrl-F and search for orion. It tells you 1238 servers are running orion. (If you want your boss to go ahead with orion, don't show him number 5 on the list!) Frank On Friday, October 20, 2000 12:38 PM, Sven van 't Veer [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: "Juan Lorandi (Chile)" wrote: Hi! I have been using orion for about 6 months now, and now, as I'm finishing my app, I need to sell orion to my customers... For this, it would be *VERY* valuable to have a list of sites (on the internet or intranets) which use orion... So, basically, what I have in mind is that anybody on this list that wishes to report a site as being partiallly/fully powered by orion, report it to my email address, [EMAIL PROTECTED], so that I can make a list of these, to publish it on WWW I think this will prove useful for us all. www.cachoeiro.net www.snpc.com.br -- == Sven E. van 't Veer http://www.cachoeiro.net Java Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] ==
Re: Orion in production
I doubt WebLogic and Orion compete against each other much. While you and I know that Orion's a capable server, for the business types Orion at US$1500/machine is a bit different from WebLogic's US$17000/cpu. Not to mention Netcraft's WebLogic results are skewed as a free hosting provider, NameZero, hosts 500,000 static html sites on it. Frank Eggink wrote: I don't know what's the downside of believing these statistics. On http://www.netcraft.com: click on 'what's that site running' click on 'help' click on 'range' click on 'Index' (of Sept 2000 of course) Hit Ctrl-F and search for orion. It tells you 1238 servers are running orion. (If you want your boss to go ahead with orion, don't show him number 5 on the list!) Frank On Friday, October 20, 2000 12:38 PM, Sven van 't Veer [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: "Juan Lorandi (Chile)" wrote: Hi! I have been using orion for about 6 months now, and now, as I'm finishing my app, I need to sell orion to my customers... For this, it would be *VERY* valuable to have a list of sites (on the internet or intranets) which use orion... So, basically, what I have in mind is that anybody on this list that wishes to report a site as being partiallly/fully powered by orion, report it to my email address, [EMAIL PROTECTED], so that I can make a list of these, to publish it on WWW I think this will prove useful for us all. www.cachoeiro.net www.snpc.com.br -- == Sven E. van 't Veer http://www.cachoeiro.net Java Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] == -- Jason Rimmer [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Orion in production
Wow! That's pretty impressive results. What sort of hardware are you running? As my performance test showed, on a single PIII650 I was able to generate on average about 4.5million page hits a day (on a simple login process anyways). -Original Message- From: Holmes, George (TWIi London) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 1:14 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production www.opengolf.com This is the official web site for the British Open Golf tournament. Did 30 million page impressions/day (ish) for the four days of the Open. George GEORGE HOLMES TWI Interactive Media House Burlington Lane LONDON W4 2TH ENGLAND TEL: +44 208 233 5631 FAX: +44 208 233 7701 CELL: +44 7968 918813 -Original Message- From: Juan Lorandi (Chile) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 19 October 2000 22:13 To: Orion-Interest Subject: Orion in production Hi! I have been using orion for about 6 months now, and now, as I'm finishing my app, I need to sell orion to my customers... For this, it would be *VERY* valuable to have a list of sites (on the internet or intranets) which use orion... So, basically, what I have in mind is that anybody on this list that wishes to report a site as being partiallly/fully powered by orion, report it to my email address, [EMAIL PROTECTED], so that I can make a list of these, to publish it on WWW I think this will prove useful for us all. TIA, JP
RE: Orion in production
I would say..Orion has almost no publicity other than word of mouth right now. Orion is just starting out compared to WebLogic, IIS, and what not. Give them some time..people are reluctant to turn to a small company with such a cheap price. I hate to say it, and I hope they don't change their price, but believe it or not, if Orion raised its license price to say $10,000 per server (hopefully not cpu), they might actually get more interest. I think there is still a lot of testing and what not to do before they should do that, if they even want to. Quite frankly, I like what they are doing. They offer a kick-ass server for a affordable price..very good for small to medium sized companies to use. There are a LOT more small to medium sized companies than big companies, so even if they are 1/10th the price (or 1/40th if you compare 4 cpu servers), I would be that the Orion team will see a lot of sales in the small/medium market, which could actually give them alot more money in the bank. On top of that, I don't know how many people Orion employs, but I know WebLogic is over 1500 people, large facility, etc. WebLogic spends a hell of a lot more on salaries, travel expenses, marketing, etc. In my opinion..maybe its just me, but I trust Orion or Apache over the big names. Plus..as I said, I can't start up my own company using WebLogic. I can with Orion. Better yet, Orion has thus far beat the hell out of every major (and as far as I can tell..every small) vendor of app servers (J2EE supporters I should say) as far as staying ahead of the ballgame, offering great performance, the best J2EE support, and the easiest to set up. I played around with WebLogic for two weeks (on and off) and still couldn't get my simple JSP page to show up. WebSphere was a nightmare, and while Resin was easy to work with, its not a full J2EE app server. IIS is easy enough, but its not J2EE, so fork that choice. JRun sucks..we have used it, tried JRun 3.0 and were not happy with it. SilverStream had nothing fancy in my opinion..they are in the same boat as IBM WebSphere..about a year late for the full J2EE support. I can't even believe IBM WebSphere still doesn't support Servlet 2.2 and JSP 1.1! I don't care how many billions you put into your software..if it doesn't even meet the standards that have been in place for almost a year now..it sure doesn't say a lot to me that the money is being spent in the right places! OAS..well, I have heard nothing but bad things about Oracles solution, and this coming from some neigbors that develop the Oracle software! Meanwhile, you have little itty bitty Orion (Ok..they are big to me! ;) over here support EJB 2.0, Servlet 2.3, full J2EE support, clusterable, easy to set up, fast, etc.. I sound like I am a sales man for Orion, but you know..I tend to read up and test alot of the latest stuff and Orion kicks the competitions ass hands down. Maybe if JRun, or someone else came out with much better products I would be on those mailing lists. I just don't see that happening. Ok..I went off..sorry. Go with Orion! -Original Message- From: Frank Eggink [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 5:09 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production I don't know what's the downside of believing these statistics. On http://www.netcraft.com: click on 'what's that site running' click on 'help' click on 'range' click on 'Index' (of Sept 2000 of course) Hit Ctrl-F and search for orion. It tells you 1238 servers are running orion. (If you want your boss to go ahead with orion, don't show him number 5 on the list!) Frank On Friday, October 20, 2000 12:38 PM, Sven van 't Veer [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: "Juan Lorandi (Chile)" wrote: Hi! I have been using orion for about 6 months now, and now, as I'm finishing my app, I need to sell orion to my customers... For this, it would be *VERY* valuable to have a list of sites (on the internet or intranets) which use orion... So, basically, what I have in mind is that anybody on this list that wishes to report a site as being partiallly/fully powered by orion, report it to my email address, [EMAIL PROTECTED], so that I can make a list of these, to publish it on WWW I think this will prove useful for us all. www.cachoeiro.net www.snpc.com.br -- == Sven E. van 't Veer http://www.cachoeiro.net Java Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] ==
RE: Orion in production
I would like to ammend my previous post. I don't actually know if Orion has marketing/publicity, and I am not in a position to say they are just starting out. I apologize if I spoke with my head up my rear..I believe my intention was to hype up Orion for all the hard work the team has done to give us a great product, not to make it sound like they are a small company. My point being, I had a very difficult time getting my boss to go with Orion over WebLogic, and even so he still wants to use WebLogic, we just don't want to spend the money right now. Alot of companies for some reason feel the name is bigger than the actual work behind it. It sucks..but that appears to be the way alot of business run. When you have a VC give you $72 million as we have received in the past year, its hard to use a product nobody is familiar with, over one that is touted the best, even if the price costs 10 to 20 times more. I of all people have had a hard time trying to understand why our company would want to waste so much money on a proudct that isn't even on par with the standards (as they claim to be) as Orion is. Anyways..Just wanted to clear that up incase I got some people thinking Orion is small. In actuality, they are big, and they will get bigger! -Original Message- From: Duffey, Kevin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 12:05 PM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production I would say..Orion has almost no publicity other than word of mouth right now. Orion is just starting out compared to WebLogic, IIS, and what not. Give them some time..people are reluctant to turn to a small company with such a cheap price. I hate to say it, and I hope they don't change their price, but believe it or not, if Orion raised its license price to say $10,000 per server (hopefully not cpu), they might actually get more interest. I think there is still a lot of testing and what not to do before they should do that, if they even want to. Quite frankly, I like what they are doing. They offer a kick-ass server for a affordable price..very good for small to medium sized companies to use. There are a LOT more small to medium sized companies than big companies, so even if they are 1/10th the price (or 1/40th if you compare 4 cpu servers), I would be that the Orion team will see a lot of sales in the small/medium market, which could actually give them alot more money in the bank. On top of that, I don't know how many people Orion employs, but I know WebLogic is over 1500 people, large facility, etc. WebLogic spends a hell of a lot more on salaries, travel expenses, marketing, etc. In my opinion..maybe its just me, but I trust Orion or Apache over the big names. Plus..as I said, I can't start up my own company using WebLogic. I can with Orion. Better yet, Orion has thus far beat the hell out of every major (and as far as I can tell..every small) vendor of app servers (J2EE supporters I should say) as far as staying ahead of the ballgame, offering great performance, the best J2EE support, and the easiest to set up. I played around with WebLogic for two weeks (on and off) and still couldn't get my simple JSP page to show up. WebSphere was a nightmare, and while Resin was easy to work with, its not a full J2EE app server. IIS is easy enough, but its not J2EE, so fork that choice. JRun sucks..we have used it, tried JRun 3.0 and were not happy with it. SilverStream had nothing fancy in my opinion..they are in the same boat as IBM WebSphere..about a year late for the full J2EE support. I can't even believe IBM WebSphere still doesn't support Servlet 2.2 and JSP 1.1! I don't care how many billions you put into your software..if it doesn't even meet the standards that have been in place for almost a year now..it sure doesn't say a lot to me that the money is being spent in the right places! OAS..well, I have heard nothing but bad things about Oracles solution, and this coming from some neigbors that develop the Oracle software! Meanwhile, you have little itty bitty Orion (Ok..they are big to me! ;) over here support EJB 2.0, Servlet 2.3, full J2EE support, clusterable, easy to set up, fast, etc.. I sound like I am a sales man for Orion, but you know..I tend to read up and test alot of the latest stuff and Orion kicks the competitions ass hands down. Maybe if JRun, or someone else came out with much better products I would be on those mailing lists. I just don't see that happening. Ok..I went off..sorry. Go with Orion! -Original Message- From: Frank Eggink [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 5:09 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production I don't know what's the downside of believing these statistics. On http://www.netcraft.com: click on 'what's that site running' click on 'help' click on 'range' click on 'Index
RE: Orion in production
I completly agree with your posts, but I beg I'm allowed to differ in one thing... Big Companies don't make enterprises like Evermind or BEA Systems rich... directly... But these BIG names make for BIG hype... as you're well aware of; That's why your boss thinks Weblogic is the way to go... That's why I have requested data to make the OPS list... And also, lack of support documentation is becoming now, as most developers are finishing their work and reach deployment time(from what I pick up of many mails in this list), a critical point about orion. Many of us are reaching the point where we have to prove no only that orion's the best, but that it also is a good business choice. This is unfairly hard due to little colaboration from Evermind's team regarding, as said, support documentation, tough it clearly seems to be changing. Perhaps its time for a change(and I hope it's a change that will keep my sorry a~s working with Orion ;-) JP -Original Message- From: Duffey, Kevin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Viernes, 20 de Octubre de 2000 16:27 To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production Importance: High I would like to ammend my previous post. I don't actually know if Orion has marketing/publicity, and I am not in a position to say they are just starting out. I apologize if I spoke with my head up my rear..I believe my intention was to hype up Orion for all the hard work the team has done to give us a great product, not to make it sound like they are a small company. My point being, I had a very difficult time getting my boss to go with Orion over WebLogic, and even so he still wants to use WebLogic, we just don't want to spend the money right now. Alot of companies for some reason feel the name is bigger than the actual work behind it. It sucks..but that appears to be the way alot of business run. When you have a VC give you $72 million as we have received in the past year, its hard to use a product nobody is familiar with, over one that is touted the best, even if the price costs 10 to 20 times more. I of all people have had a hard time trying to understand why our company would want to waste so much money on a proudct that isn't even on par with the standards (as they claim to be) as Orion is. Anyways..Just wanted to clear that up incase I got some people thinking Orion is small. In actuality, they are big, and they will get bigger! -Original Message- From: Duffey, Kevin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 12:05 PM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion in production I would say..Orion has almost no publicity other than word of mouth right now. Orion is just starting out compared to WebLogic, IIS, and what not. Give them some time..people are reluctant to turn to a small company with such a cheap price. I hate to say it, and I hope they don't change their price, but believe it or not, if Orion raised its license price to say $10,000 per server (hopefully not cpu), they might actually get more interest. I think there is still a lot of testing and what not to do before they should do that, if they even want to. Quite frankly, I like what they are doing. They offer a kick-ass server for a affordable price..very good for small to medium sized companies to use. There are a LOT more small to medium sized companies than big companies, so even if they are 1/10th the price (or 1/40th if you compare 4 cpu servers), I would be that the Orion team will see a lot of sales in the small/medium market, which could actually give them alot more money in the bank. On top of that, I don't know how many people Orion employs, but I know WebLogic is over 1500 people, large facility, etc. WebLogic spends a hell of a lot more on salaries, travel expenses, marketing, etc. In my opinion..maybe its just me, but I trust Orion or Apache over the big names. Plus..as I said, I can't start up my own company using WebLogic. I can with Orion. Better yet, Orion has thus far beat the hell out of every major (and as far as I can tell..every small) vendor of app servers (J2EE supporters I should say) as far as staying ahead of the ballgame, offering great performance, the best J2EE support, and the easiest to set up. I played around with WebLogic for two weeks (on and off) and still couldn't get my simple JSP page to show up. WebSphere was a nightmare, and while Resin was easy to work with, its not a full J2EE app server. IIS is easy enough, but its not J2EE, so fork that choice. JRun sucks..we have used it, tried JRun 3.0 and were not happy with it. SilverStream had nothing fancy in my opinion..they are in the same boat as IBM WebSphere..about a year late for the full J2EE support. I can't even believe IBM WebSphere still doesn't support Servlet 2.2 and JSP 1.1! I don't care how many billions you put into your software..if it doesn't even meet the standards that have been in place for almost
RE: Orion in production - Let's sell support!
Hello all... --On Friday, October 20, 2000 5:35 PM -0300 "Juan Lorandi (Chile)" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And also, lack of support documentation is becoming now, as most developers are finishing their work and reach deployment time(from what I pick up of many mails in this list), a critical point about orion. Many of us are reaching the point where we have to prove no only that orion's the best, but that it also is a good business choice. This is unfairly hard due to little colaboration from Evermind's team regarding, as said, support documentation, tough it clearly seems to be changing. This is a key issue. There is an old saying that time is money. Not true in software. Time is far more valuable than money. Money can be raised but time can not. Orion is reasonably priced for the product itself. However, if using Orion means a lot of trial and error development and no official support from the vendor, the costs in extra consumption of developers time and oppertunity loss from delayed market entry could easily exceed the price tag of Weblogic. Don't get me wrong, I like Orion. I like it alot. Currently, our intention is to complete development on it and then license it and deploy with it and hopefully sell it with our product. This goal would be one heck of a lot easier to obtain if we had official support from the vendor. Right now, there are people here banging their heads on the wall just trying to guess at what works and what dossen't, whats implemented and whats not. It's tireing. Anybody want to help me start a business selling Orion support on a 900 number? Just charge several dollars a minute, on an incident by incident basis. If the support is competant, it would sell big. Heck, we could make more money then Evermind! Big Grin OK, just kidding, but this is a serious issue. Jim
Orion in production
Hi! I have been using orion for about 6 months now, and now, as I'm finishing my app, I need to sell orion to my customers... For this, it would be *VERY* valuable to have a list of sites (on the internet or intranets) which use orion... So, basically, what I have in mind is that anybody on this list that wishes to report a site as being partiallly/fully powered by orion, report it to my email address, [EMAIL PROTECTED], so that I can make a list of these, to publish it on WWW I think this will prove useful for us all. TIA, JP
