So, why use Orion
In answer to 'Why use Orion I had to throw in my two cents, even through I'm no longer an official subscriber, since I found reading the archives more beneficial then just subscribing. Now there are really only three products I play with on a consistant basis, which are Resin, jboss-jetty, and Orion. 1. Weblogic is king of the hill, if you can afford the price, but it is not necessarily a better product then the cheaper alternatives. 2. Tomcat did start out kind of buggy, but is much better is 3.2.x releases, and I look forward to 4.0. Jboss does have a lot of people looking at the code, and a hugh number of developers. So far, jetty-jboss is very stable, and while behind Orion on features, it will catch up in 3.0. 3. Magnus and Karl will continue to develop a good product in Orion, but they need to upgrade the documentation and support to gain a wider audience, which is not their primary goal. Their primary goal is to work on a server. 4. Resin is a great JSP engine, but has no EJB in VM intergration yet. But the source is available for developers, which gives it an edge over Orion (as well as having more staff members). 5. I really haven't seen anything from Enhydra Enterprise or openejb that impresses me yet, but Enhydra Enterprise does have the people to make it work. So far, for cheap alternatives, I like Orion, Resin, and Jboss-jetty. __ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 a year! http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/
Re: So, why use Orion?
I've designed, wrutten and implemented and EJB app using Orion AND Weblogic (It sounds like your situation: we needed to support Weblogic because many potential clients would already have it in house, but wanted a cheaper alternative it was possible). For my client's needs Weblogic provided no additional benefit, and had some disadvantages (e.g. non-standard deployment). Orion definitely worked out better for me, for my client, and for their clients. I would say that, what you read on the mail lists not withstanding, Weblogic's support is pretty good; it is one of the things you're paying for. They also do a good job of providing non-standard value-added features (which may or may not be a good thing.) If your project is not using the latest bleeding edge features, however (meaning it is using features that have been in Orion for a while, getting beaten up by lots of people), and you have more than a passing knowledge of EJBs, then you won't NEED a lot of extensive vendor support. Every time we had a problem with Orion, we always got answers from the EJB mailing list or this mailing list (it was never an Orion problem; it was the subtleties of JMS that were tripping us up). My suggestion to your boss, to minimize project risk: 1) avoid bleeding edge technology (it will break in unexpected ways) 2) avoid exotic implementations (use an OS and version that a lot of people have used, on hardware a lot of people use; you will not differentiate your product by having the latest version of AIX) 3) Don't spend a LOT of money for services that you won't use, since you'll be reading the Orion and EJB mailing lists every day anyway. 4) Use Orion 5) Buy/lease some of the hardware you'll be implementing on, and run your target os on it now; start testing on it as soon as you can. You don't want to uncover a bug in the JVM for your os during implemetation week. 6) Avoid similies like the plague just my 2 cents LHCommons --- Julian Richardson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, I'm trying to collect together reasons for chosing Orion over other app servers - our company's been doing a lot of research into EJB technology over the last few months and currently the favoured choices seem to be JBoss and Weblogic. I can understand JBoss as a target environment - after all it's free. But I haven't seen a good case (yet) for using Weblogic; as far as I know it's pretty expensive and support actually seems a little lacking from what I've heard from others. From what I know it is pretty feature-rich though. Anyway, there's a chance for using Orion in preference (or at least as another official environment) given a solid list of reasons... Any ideas would be appreciated - performance, scalability, standards adherance, reliability, cost, platform availability, support, documentation quaility etc. etc. (I've been using it for a couple of months now and haven't had any trouble other than the usual learning 'glitches' :-) cheers Jules __ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 a year! http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/
RE: So, why use Orion?
* Personally I find the combination of apache+tomcat+jboss more complicated in terms of configuration. * Last I heard JBoss HA/clustering software is preliminary. Orion has clustering setup documented but I have not try it. If you want web tier servlet HttpSession failover Orion support it. You can't do it with Tomcat. * You can update orion directly through the internet using the autoupdate tool. * Orion has nice GUI admin tool which let you see the internal of the container. I can't speak for a production environment as I am still learning EJB. First using Tomcat+Jboss now on Orion. Check out app servers comparison: http://www.flashline.com/components/appservermatrix.jsp. The next best thing in terms of license cost seems to be Macromedia JRun. Any one has any comment on JRun? Any idea is Orion going to the path of being an authorised Java licensee? http://java.sun.com/j2ee/licensees.html -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Kevin Duffey Sent: Thursday, 31 May, 2001 1:35 PM To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: So, why use Orion? Hi, That's a tough call. Orion rocks in terms of performance, but they are far behind most others in documentation and support. JBoss is rock solid on EJB and has far more developers working on the project at any one time than I would say any other app server. Documentation is pretty good and you can't beat the price. The architecture of JBoss is pretty nice too. I think Orion's strongest points are its performance. Because it integrates the web server, jsp/servlet engine and ejb engine in a single jvm, its very fast. Ofcourse, you can run it in two tiers as well leaving one for ejb, and one for front-end web serving...nothing gigabit networking wont remedy in terms of network speed as the only difference in performance between running it on a single box in one jvm. I am interested in seeing how well Apache 2, Tomcat 4 and JBoss do as a team. Its a complete solution for web pages, servlets/jsp, and ejb and its all free and very well supported. I'd say the only downside to using free or cheap software is most companies simply wont do it because they are too naive to realize its good quality software. I still have yet to figure out why it is upper management involve political crap into the mix when it comes to choosing a good solid platform to deploy on. For some reason, if they have millions in the bank, they need to spend millions on the hardware and software otherwise they can't justify it. WebLogic 6 is very nice indeed, but you pay a premium, at $17K per cpu per server for a clustered setup, it can easily cost $100K for a site with fail-over and backup at dual co-lo's. Personally, I would use Apache 2, Tomcat 4 and JBoss for the reason of cost, documentation, performance and support. Orion still kicks all butts in sheer performance however. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Julian Richardson Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2001 1:02 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: So, why use Orion? Hi, I'm trying to collect together reasons for chosing Orion over other app servers - our company's been doing a lot of research into EJB technology over the last few months and currently the favoured choices seem to be JBoss and Weblogic. I can understand JBoss as a target environment - after all it's free. But I haven't seen a good case (yet) for using Weblogic; as far as I know it's pretty expensive and support actually seems a little lacking from what I've heard from others. From what I know it is pretty feature-rich though. Anyway, there's a chance for using Orion in preference (or at least as another official environment) given a solid list of reasons... Any ideas would be appreciated - performance, scalability, standards adherance, reliability, cost, platform availability, support, documentation quaility etc. etc. (I've been using it for a couple of months now and haven't had any trouble other than the usual learning 'glitches' :-) cheers Jules _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
So, why use Orion?
Hi, I'm trying to collect together reasons for chosing Orion over other app servers - our company's been doing a lot of research into EJB technology over the last few months and currently the favoured choices seem to be JBoss and Weblogic. I can understand JBoss as a target environment - after all it's free. But I haven't seen a good case (yet) for using Weblogic; as far as I know it's pretty expensive and support actually seems a little lacking from what I've heard from others. From what I know it is pretty feature-rich though. Anyway, there's a chance for using Orion in preference (or at least as another official environment) given a solid list of reasons... Any ideas would be appreciated - performance, scalability, standards adherance, reliability, cost, platform availability, support, documentation quaility etc. etc. (I've been using it for a couple of months now and haven't had any trouble other than the usual learning 'glitches' :-) cheers Jules
RE: So, why use Orion?
Hi, That's a tough call. Orion rocks in terms of performance, but they are far behind most others in documentation and support. JBoss is rock solid on EJB and has far more developers working on the project at any one time than I would say any other app server. Documentation is pretty good and you can't beat the price. The architecture of JBoss is pretty nice too. I think Orion's strongest points are its performance. Because it integrates the web server, jsp/servlet engine and ejb engine in a single jvm, its very fast. Ofcourse, you can run it in two tiers as well leaving one for ejb, and one for front-end web serving...nothing gigabit networking wont remedy in terms of network speed as the only difference in performance between running it on a single box in one jvm. I am interested in seeing how well Apache 2, Tomcat 4 and JBoss do as a team. Its a complete solution for web pages, servlets/jsp, and ejb and its all free and very well supported. I'd say the only downside to using free or cheap software is most companies simply wont do it because they are too naive to realize its good quality software. I still have yet to figure out why it is upper management involve political crap into the mix when it comes to choosing a good solid platform to deploy on. For some reason, if they have millions in the bank, they need to spend millions on the hardware and software otherwise they can't justify it. WebLogic 6 is very nice indeed, but you pay a premium, at $17K per cpu per server for a clustered setup, it can easily cost $100K for a site with fail-over and backup at dual co-lo's. Personally, I would use Apache 2, Tomcat 4 and JBoss for the reason of cost, documentation, performance and support. Orion still kicks all butts in sheer performance however. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Julian Richardson Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2001 1:02 AM To: Orion-Interest Subject: So, why use Orion? Hi, I'm trying to collect together reasons for chosing Orion over other app servers - our company's been doing a lot of research into EJB technology over the last few months and currently the favoured choices seem to be JBoss and Weblogic. I can understand JBoss as a target environment - after all it's free. But I haven't seen a good case (yet) for using Weblogic; as far as I know it's pretty expensive and support actually seems a little lacking from what I've heard from others. From what I know it is pretty feature-rich though. Anyway, there's a chance for using Orion in preference (or at least as another official environment) given a solid list of reasons... Any ideas would be appreciated - performance, scalability, standards adherance, reliability, cost, platform availability, support, documentation quaility etc. etc. (I've been using it for a couple of months now and haven't had any trouble other than the usual learning 'glitches' :-) cheers Jules
