hey Simon -
I'm interested in seeing what sort of problems are you having with OC4J?
My own personal experience with it (and yes I work on the product) is that is relatively easy to use.
Let me jot down a bit of a brain dump about OC4J and 9iAS in general. Sorry if you've seen this type of information before, but I thought that I would at least provide some level of description of the product.
OC4J comes in bsaically two different packaging options. The same set of
Java code is provided in each distribution model.
* a zip file distribution which can be unzipped on a machine and used straight away. This has an inbuilt HTTP/HTTPS listener, supports clustering of stateful web applications, provides support for all
J2EE specs (we just released a J2EE 1.3 compatible developer preview), and is easy to configure, manage, and deploy apps to through a couple of XML files.
* A broader 9iAS distribution which provides a lot of other valuable components - it integrates OC4J with the bundled Apache HTTP server, it provides a process management framework to automatically start/stop/restart process in case of failure, it supports load balancing and failover using Apache modules, it provides a HTML browser based console for management of single nodes and clustered nodes. In addition it also provides additional services such as inbuilt single-sign-on support, a portal framework which is built on the core components, a bunch of pre built
JSP tag libraries and support for Web Services by exposing both elements of the J2EE component model (stateless session beans) and other application models (such as PL/SQL applications) as exposed Web Service endpoints.
We just released a new developer preview which is J2EE 1.3 compatible so has tested support for all J2EE 1.3 APIs such as EJB 2.0, JSP 1.2,
Servlet 2.3, J2CA 1.0, etc.
If you have the time, I'm interested in seeing what you found difficult or hard to do with OC4J.
bye now!
-steve-