Oracle 9i AS: Don't fall for the Oracle Hype!
Written: Mar 07 '01 (Updated Sep 22 '01)
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Pros: PL/SQL and oracle Forms support.
Cons: Buggy. Minimal, and needlessly proprietary, support for EJB, Servlets, and JSP.
The Bottom Line: Don't waste your money. For a real enterprise app server go with BEA weblogic. Or configure your own bleeding edge app server with apache, tomcat, www.orionserver.com or www.jboss.org.
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| kkwiatek's Full Review: Oracle Internet Application Server |
UPDATE 9/22/01: I must be a prophet! 9iAS was sooo terrible (as I said below) that is did not make it past one version release before oracle BOUGHT www.orionserver.com and made it the center piece of it's java application server, thus SCRAPPING it's J2EE server!!!! I was telling users to go with www.orionserver.com several months before!! I still recommend you don't buy 9iS, but instead just buy orionserver.com directly...
-------- ORIGINAL REVIEW -------
If there is one thing that Oracle does well it is HYPE their products. BUT, with the exception of their database server, the reality is that they consistently deliver software with questionable quality. The Oracle 9i Application Server is a classic case of the techno-babble shell game that Oracle has perfected.
If you haven't learned this by now, let me clue you in. Oracle likes to license skeleton technology from companies (ie jbuilder becomes jdeveloper) for which they have no real expertise. Then they add a few wizards to connect it to an oracle database, and re-sell to you at inflated prices. BUT because they often have no real expertise in the product they bought (ie java application servers like 9i AS) the product never matures, or much less even makes a token effort to keep up with the latest specs.
When people buy products like 9i AS, they are really buying software that has been around for a few years, and is simply renamed (ie OWS becomes OAS which becomes 9iAS). I think they rename it so that people think Oracle is comming out with the "latest", when in reality it is just the same old same old.
The 9i Application Server is hard to take seriously. It has basically the same functionality of their OWS -from three years ago! The only thing they improved was the HYPE! In a day when we are on the verge of EJB 1.2 and servlet 2.3 and JSP 1.2 -Oracle is just now releasing an EJB server that cannot serve anything but EJB session beans (EJB 1.0 = no entity beans!). In addition, they have repackaged the freely available Apache web server with the ancient servlet engine "Jserv" (even apache.org recommends that you abandon Jserv and use Tomcat)! If that weren't bad enough, they want you to use Oracle JSP -a proprietary edition of JSP that is almost two spec versions behind -and is not supported by a wide developement communtiy!! (there are so many free, and better ones around)
The one thing that Oracle could have done to add value, was to package Apache pre-configured for mod_ssl, and mod_perl, LWP and tomcat/JSP so that you could have a turn-key solution. This would have been a real time saver since creating a apache server with ssl and dbi can be tricky and time consuming ...but even here they fell flat on their faces. They left out all the needed database modules required to connect to a database.... you must download, compile, and install them... heck, I could have done that without paying Oracle a single cent!
We have used this application server in it's various incarnations for a year... and found it to be a buggy convoluted mess. Want to see how slow it is? -Just go to their site and try submitting an "oracle tar" during normal business hours...
In all fairness, J2EE is still emerging, but if I wanted a fairly stable bleeding edge app server I would have to simply go with the free www.orionserver.com or www.jboss.org, and use a custom built apache ssl and mod_perl server.... The load balancing and fail-over of 9i AS doesn't work that well and isn't worth the expense...
Of course if you have a large amount of money, you should go with the BEA weblogic server, which is a true J2EE web application server, built and supported by a company that knows what they are doing...
Recommended:
No
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