Ironflare AB is proud to announce a strategic alliance with Sun Microsystems to officially license the Java™ 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE). The Orion Application Server is an industrial strength J2EE application server, and the formal licensing of the J2EE platform underlines Ironflare’s current and future dedication and adherence to
open standards.

By licensing J2EE technology, Ironflare reaffirms its commitment to deliver one of the best performing application servers on the market. Ironflare now has access to the full range of compatibility testing tools that Sun Microsystems provides to J2EE licensees and is now able to verify and ensure that all areas of the specification are correctly implemented across the board.

The Orion Application server was first released in 1999, and its strength and features have made it a popular choice for server side java development. It has been tracking Sun specifications since the Servlet 2.1 specification. It can be found at

http://www.orionserver.com.

Big congrats from me! You've so earned it!

Will this new stuff be available in a future version of Oracle iAS? Since Oracle now has a free license for ISV embedding it would be nice to know :-)

That's great news! Good job.

Jason McKerr

Here, here.

Vic

Congrats Magnus! Still a fan of Orion - find it to be one of the best value J2EE products available.

Orion forever.

Hi,

I've checked the Authorized Java Licensees of J2EE page at Sun (http://java.sun.com/j2ee/licensees.html) and Orion does not appear there yet.
I have a question: didn't Sun have a problem with the fact that Orion is Open Source Application Server?
I guess it is now JBoss turn to get Sun's J2EE brand stamp...

Regards.

Orion isn't Open source...

/F

Based on my past experience at SpiritSoft, it could take Sun months to get round to updating their licensee page; the next step is for IronFlare to self-certify using the J2EE Compliance Test Suite (CTS); this should lead to an entry on http://java.sun.com/j2ee/compatibility.html but Sun's marketing team can be *real slow* at organizing that - in spite of the substantial sums involved in licensing.

It's a good thing that most people will take IronFlare's word for J2EE compliance (as eg Mike Sick already has).

=== My own opinion, not that of my former employers, by the way ===

Nigel

Good job. I really enjoy using Orion. Orion runs so well I almost forget it is there. This is another big win for smaller AS vendors succeeding when their only form of mass marketing is a good product. I hope this is a sign of your continued commitment to the Orion Server and the J2EE specification.

KJ

Congrats on a job well done!
Finally the most compliant J2EE server gets certified.
Looking forward to see Orionserver's early J2EE
compliance :-)

I hope JBOSS does the same and stop making this awful lot of noise.

JBoss takes the J2EE standards as something between guidelines and suggestions, really. E.g., with the classloader basically broken in 3.0, non-serializable transactions and stuff like that, I really can't see them getting certified.

E.g., let's say that several EJB applications (or just several beans) are running on the same server, and each one was written by different people, using different versions of the same library. (The one we first discovered the problem with was Electric XML, but it happens with others just as well.) Well, the first version loaded is the one which will be used by all other applications, instead of letting them use their own libraries packed in the EAR file. Basically "unified classloader" simply sticks to the first class with that name which was loaded, regardless from where. In our case, the servlet which used one version of Electric XML was stepping on the toes of an EJB which relied on a whole different version, packed in its EAR file.

That's not even only for libraries: if two app developper teams (presumably from the same company) were to independently come up with the same a class name (e.g., com.some_dot_com.util.NonThreadedCache) in their EJB's, those two apps couldn't run on the same JBoss server, because of classloader conflicts.

Basically deploying one application or bean can break everything else running on the server. And while JBoss does offer a means to say "I don't want to export my classes" (as opposed to the logical "I want you to try my own classes first"), it (A) causes any call from such a bean to another to fail with an exception, and (B) it doesn't even solve anything unless _all_ ear files on that server use that option.

So, really, I'm not against JBoss or anything, I do find the idea of an open source application server cool, but... they'd do well to start actually complying with the standard. I realize that making a fuss about how Sun oppresses them is more fun, but the cruel reality is that at the moment they're doing worse stuff to the J2EE standard than Microsoft ever did to Java.

This is very good news - Orion has always been my favorite application server. It's fast and efficient and priced very nicely.

Congratulation to Ironflare!

Cheers
Ray