Behrang Saeedzadeh

Is Orion Application Server dead?

Sunday, September 30, 2007 1:47:15 AM

Does anybody know why Orion Application Server, with the exception of a few minor bug fix releases, has stayed intact, like a dead project, for years? Orion was a very fast and memory conservative application server. Its fast startup time had made it very suitable for development environments. Orion was so great that even Oracle built its own application server based on Orion.

I wonder why they didn't keep on developing Orion after J2EE 1.3. Does anybody know?

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Comments

Anonymous # Sunday, September 30, 2007 5:02:21 AM

Anonymous writes: If I am not mistaken I believe the Orion Application Server became the base code for the Oracle OC4J container. I could be off but I believe once Oracle bought the code the open source development stopped. But like I said I could be wrong...

Anonymous # Sunday, September 30, 2007 8:05:34 AM

anjan bacchu writes: hi there, like anonymous says, they licensed their code to Oracle and the contract, I'm told also included a lot of maintenance work. I guess the Orion developers didn't have enough time to maintain Orion as well as honor the Oracle appserver. It would take a lot more time to build support for JEE 1.5 after a few years, especially with JBoss and tomcat entrenched with decent features and performance. I guess the same thing happened to pramati(www.pramati.com), albeit not as devastating. BR, ~A

Behrang Saeedzadehbehrangsa # Tuesday, October 2, 2007 7:45:50 AM

Oh, I didn't know that they ceased development of Orion after granting Oracle to build OC4J on top of Orion. You know, Oracle also bought the license to build JDeveloper on top of JBuilder, but Borland did not stop development of JBuilder after that.

Having said that, as long as I know, the Orion guys never released a public statement regarding their future directions after licensing Oracle to use Orion for OC4J.

Anonymous # Tuesday, October 2, 2007 9:51:15 PM

Anonymous writes: It's a sad story indeed. Orion was the fastest server of its time and in fact -the only- server that didn't crashed when under load. That's right, every other Java AS back then crashed when under severe load. Not Orion. It just kept going and going, even on the lousy hardware of those days. When it was clear that no new versions of Orion were coming out, we eventually moved over to Tomcat. There were some announcements that a magical Orion 3 was in the works, so we actually were a bit reluctant to move away from Orion. Luckily it turned out to be a good move. Orion indeed turned out to be a dead project and will stay at J2EE 1.3 forever.

Anonymous # Wednesday, October 3, 2007 12:41:28 AM

GreatWebGuy writes: Oracle killed Orion, that's for sure. Oracle Application Server is at least 3 years behind at this point in terms of scalability and performance compared to other JEE Application servers. It seems that everything they touch turns to crap, JDeveloper is a piece of work too, definitely wouldn't use it by choice.

Anonymous # Thursday, October 4, 2007 1:38:37 AM

Anonymous writes: We moved from Orion to JBoss (kicking and screaming) as the base dev platform. We target JBoss, Bea WL and IBM WS. Lately, some of us have been using GlassFish. It has fast startup we miss from out Orion days with really cutting edge JEE support. Great IDE support too.