Hello Srivatsan,
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to completely discredit Bea WebLogic, it clearly has some technical edge over Orion being a little more mature, but it comes at a price or I should say at a significant price which may be prohibitive for anyone starting with the technology. If I had infinitely deep pockets, I would surely stick with WebLogic for both development and deployment (actually I'm not sure about development), but paying almost $2K per developer seat and almost $20K per server processor deployment license is not really what I have in mind. And I'm not talking about clustering and support because if you through in those in the mix, you can easily come up with sub-mil figures per year. Orion favorably compares to this being absolutely free for both development and non-commercial deployment and just $1500 for server license per node for commercial deployment regardless of the number of processors. Throwing additional node in the Orion cluster costs the same $1500, which is dirt-cheap in J2EE arena. If you're closely watching J2EE application server market, there is a trend toward so-called "commodization" of application servers - application server market is getting more and more competitive with wider acceptance driving down the prices. And it looks like the commodity application servers like Orion, In-Q-My (subsidiary of SAP), Unify e-Wave, and
jBoss are going to eat away a significan market share from big guys. Orion is just getting ahead of the curve. Sorry guys, but dinosours always loose in the end, and the lean and mean always win...
Feature-wise, Orion is not far behind WebLogic and should be considered a serious contender especially due to its blazing performance. Orion shines in terms of performance due to its tightly integrated design and according to benchmarks performed by Orion developers and Oracle (and my own experience with Orion on lower-end hardware), Orion app. server beats the sh*t out of the competition in the J2EE arena.