Oracle claims to be the most downloaded app server over the last quarter. Oracle claims 585K people downloaded the 9i app server versus 339K for WebLogic during Q4 2000. Of course, all numbers from any vendor are not audited independently.

One point worth making is that Oracle makes fully featured versions of their software (database and application servers) available to developers at little or no cost through their tech net program. It would be great if the other vendors would follow suit rather than only allowing crippled versions to be downloaded. By crippled, I mean time limited or limited numbers of concurrent connections.

Click here for the Oracle press release.

It's probably the most downloaded app server because most people THOUGHT they were getting the db server! ;-)

Seriously, anybody out there using 9i and have good words about them? I haven't really heard too many positive reviews about 9i...

Like all Oracle software (excluding the RDBMS) it is buggy and performs reasonably only in large-scale deployments. Their caching technology does have some potential though.

There are only two reasons I can think of that explain why 9iAS has more downloads:

- Oracle allow developer access to full versions of most of their products. It is easier to learn and/or review technologies such as J2EE with a non-crippled product.

- Developers download the product just to find out what all the babble from Oracle is about.

Seriously, Oracle is concerned about WebLogics' standing in the J2EE community and are performing 'creative' (ie. 'fudged') marketing to steal market share from BEA. The 'Million Dollar Challenge' was just another example of this. IMHO, 9iAS is still an immature product that has a long way to go to catch the likes of WebLogic et al.

The other thing is that you can never download an Oracle product successfully the first time. The OTN is infamous for cutting you off of your downloads. If you divide the total number by the number of average attempts then you will see the true number of downloads.

Dan

I haven't had that experience but I believe you. I usually download from the office or a cable modem and use GetRight and usually just leave it overnight and have little problems. You can also buy a OTN track which is the software on CD delivered to your place for US200 a year which isn't bad either if you don't have a T1 line.

It's possible that Oracle or BEA report these retries as seperate downloads, I guess. But, anyway, the numbers have to be taken with a pinch of salt as they are not audited.

It definitely has promise, and has a lot more to offer than previous versions. I wish their VM were faster, though. I understand it was designed for concurrency over raw performance, but retrofitting the ideas from Hotspot into it should be possible.

Yeah right... Anyone who builds on the Oracel Application Server is a fool.

There seem to be more negative notes about this app server than positive ones. Well, we have a project that will be deployed on it, does anyone know if 9i App server's Windows and UNIX versions work the same for a Java application ? any help or resource is appreciated. thanks

Our company has just failed in a big project.
Boss claimed that the reason is "Oracle sales has
misleading me to chose such a suck app server(IAS)".
Although I belive that we will fail even if BEA was
chosed.

Would you be the Billy Newport who worked at Bankgiro, Sweden in early 90's?

Eugene McConville