After a long hiatus, the Orion team is proud to announce the release of Orion 2.0.3 (experimental). This release includes a number of J2EE specification compliance fixes, as well as numerous bug fixes.
 
Orion 2.0.3 can be downloaded from http://www.orionserver.com/download.jsp
A list of changes can be found at http://www.orionserver.com/orion/changes.txt

Documentation is available at http://www.orionserver.com/docs/

Magnus Rydin
The Orion team

How many of you have experience with Orion?

Experience with Orion? I used to absolutely love it! It was small and fast, supported emerging standards, and worked great!

Then came the OC4J years. Ironflare/Orion did lots of work building Oracle a reasonable application server core.. and did a great job. OC4J works well and has a reasonably small footprint. Not as small as the "real" OrionServer, but not too bad. But Orion started to lag.. and lag.. and many people didn't know if it was alive, dead, suspended, or what.

I guess its back now, but really, I would have a hard time building a project around it until I see that it really *is* back. I don't want to get stuck waiting for updates or bug fixes during one of these long delays.

So.. great product from my perspective.. and if they are really back and working on it full time, thats great!

I use Orion and think its great.

But, I have to agree that the big problem is with the long delays between releases.

I remember I was really happy when Oracle announced that they had licensed Orion. Then after a year and a half a really regreted it.

One of the things that lured me to Orion years ago, was they were fast to implement the latest specs. Now it seems that releases are few and far between.

Can Ironflare enlighten us as to the future roadmap for Orion?

Used it for years, and still use it, as my development platform even though my shop exclusively uses weblogic as the production platform.

Hi,
I just want to say that I have great respect for the folks at IronFlare for the product they've put together. I have used orion since v 1.4 and I've had the chance to compare it with oc4j 9.0.3/4 (back in the days when Oracle forked oc4j from Orion). The difference was obvious ;-)

Congrats!
florin

when Oracle forked oc4j from Orion

Should that be forked up! I too have used both, and I must say that Oracle have made a real hash of Orion. 9.0.3 is dreadful and 9.0.4, or is that 10g!?, is not much better though the management console is much better.

From the OrionServer.com FAQ "About Orion" section:

>What sets Orion apart from other application servers?
>
>Many things make Orion a leader among application servers. A few of these >things are:
>
>Superb performance. Orion is easily the fastest J2EE-based Aplication Server

Are there any benchmarks to back up this claim that use relevant products? I've read http://www.orionserver.com/benchmarks/benchmark.html but that's using not only an old Orion server (1.1) but also ancient versions of other servers (e.g. tomcat 3.x and Resin 1.2), and the JDK itself (1.3.0). Needless to say, everyone has improved performance since, including undoubtedly Orion, so new benchmarks would be interesting.

I've seen studies like http://www.webperformanceinc.com/library/ServletReport/ where Orion is indeed the leader in some categories, but not nearly all of them, and not nearly worthy of the "easily the fastest" claim.

First Off: We've been using Orion for a number of years, along with Weblogic, JBoss and others... we basically help our customers pick the best "bang for their buck" with regards to their specific needs. Orion is blazingly fast, and easy to use. We've been super pleased with it, and use it for our own production systems.


However, about 18 or 24 months back we did a fair amount of testing of Orion's JMS implementation and found numerous problems (lost messages for example). We haven't had the opportunity to really test it out again - as we selected different solutions for JMS and have ran with them.

I'm curious what any current users (or even Orion developers) have to say about the current state of JMS support within Orion?