Orion Server

http://www.orionserver.com/

Orion is an interesting entry into the EJB server market. It skates the line between being a commercial product ala WebLogic and an opensource project ala jBoss. It is definitely a commercial product (and you cannot get the source), but the licenses are cheap ($1500/machine, not cpu) and free for development and noncommercial deployment.

Like an opensource project, support comes primarily from the user community through the orion-interest mailing list. This is important, because the documentation is sparse (although getting better). But like a commercial product, the quality of the server is amazing - everything just works according to the J2EE spec. Support for the EJB2.0 spec is *far* in advance of every other server, including WebLogic. [note: WebLogic has caught up and even surpassed Orion in a few areas such as EJB QL support]

If you're a J2EE guru, you will love this server. You will especially love the close community of affictionadoes built up around it; really, it feels a lot like an open source project except that somebody else is doing all the work :-)

If you're a J2EE novice, you're either going to have A) the best learning experience of your life, or B) the most horrible nightmare of your life. Depends on what your attitude is. I learned J2EE on this system, and it wasn't that hard. But it was a lot of work, and I might have given up if there was an cheap alternative with EJB2.0 support. YMMV.

-- JeffSchnitzer

I experienced alternative (A) during 2000. Really learing J2EE was a good thing, since it also meant learning a lot about that kind of architecture, persistence, and distribution solutions. OrionServer turned out to be really good. But if I had just developed a single website I would have preferred something that was easier to get started with for the J2EE beginner. --AndersBengtsson

I LOVE OrionServer! I learned Servlets, JSP & EJB on OrionServer, believe me, it's a revelation. I dumped TomCat, JBoss for the simplicity of this app server. I recommend it VERY HIGHLY. Ofcourse, it's not opensource, but it will take ages to get comfortable with J2EE itself. So, open source is not exactly necessary here.

--Vamsee Krishna

One advice: don't try to migrate an J2EE application from another server like JBoss to Oracle Application Server. I'll end up sick. If have, or wish to develop using Oracle Application Server, do start from the very begining with JDev.

--Carlos Eugênio

OrionServer is used as the J2EE engine in Oracle Application Server.