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.
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.
