WebORB for .NET is now free
Last night, Midnightcoders announced that they are changing their business model and thereby make WebORB free for every platform they support. That includes their .NET solution. If you’ve never heard of WebORB, it’s more or less like Adobe’s own DataServices solution but specific to .NET back-ends (Midnightcoders also have versions for Java, PHP and Ruby).
WebORB enables seamless integration between .NET server applications and Flex/Flash applications. It allows you to use AMF or RTMP from your .NET server back end to your Flex front-end including more sophisticated communication like data push, remote shared objects and message broadcasting.
If you’re in to .NET development, this is good news since it now allows you to easily combine the power of Flex with the power of the back-end you’re used to with the ease of use AMF & RTMP communication offers. Go check it out.
6 Comments
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We’ve been using WebORB for the last 6 months and are very happy with it. It is extremely fast and stable in a setup of many concurrent users. Although we ran into some small bugs, those were quickly resolved thanks to the quick and efficient communication of the WebORB team at MidnightCoders. We’ll certainly digg into the pub/sub stuff now that it’s free. This is an amazing and free product!
We just released a new version of WebORB for .NET 3.6.01. The 3.6 releases now includes:
- support for Silverlight
- support for server-to-server AMF invocatgions
- Visual Studio templates
- custom MSMQ factories
- class mappings between abstract generic collections and concrete implementations
We have a couple new products too that work with WebORB for .NET now, and other WebORB versions soon.
- WebORB Messaging SDK (used to ease development of applications that require messaging)
- PDF Generator
Developers can download the free Community Edition of our products at:
http://www.themidnightcoders.com/products/weborb-for-net/download.html
Happy Coding!
Kathleen
It is not free – you can have one Community Edition license per company and you can’t redistrubute it.. How can you make anything for your client with such restrictions?
Please don’t be fooled by this message. Weborb is NOT FREE!. They have community version and Enterprise version. The community version has to be obtained by contacting themidnightcoders’ sales office. The downloadable version is actually “Enterprise version limited to 5 IP”. If it is really free, why don’t they put community version downloadable? This is all a big scam to get you into their net.
Community version is only allowed to run in one server in your company but the website also said “Unlimited IP”. Very confusing.
If your company is ready for a commercial product, well it might be the way to go. Otherwise, once again, it is NOT Free!!
Also chiming in about their “Free” concept. To get the free edition, you need to “apply” to their sales team and provide them with an up-front testimonial (yes, before you have used it) and you also MUST agree to let them use your ignorant testimonial (after all, you haven’t even tried it) which must be at least 3-5 sentences long including your name, company name, URL, and logo in their marketing materials. Once you’ve done all that you get a single license key for a single server just so you can try it. Here it is in their words:
“Please use the form below to apply for your free Community Edition license key (one per company). The following requirements must be met in order to receive your free Community Edition license key:
* Provide your name and email address, your company name, logo, customer quote;
* Agree that Midnight Coders, Inc. may create a case-study based on your usage of the product or your application which uses WebORB Community Edition;
* Agree that Midnight Coders, Inc. can use the information you provided for marketing purposes.
Please describe your experience using WebORB Community Edition. Specifically, we’d like to know what features you found the most useful; why you decided to use WebORB; and how it helped you and your project. You should provide 3-5 sentences. (Note: If you provide a simple one-sentence quote, you will be asked to expand and provide more information before being issued a Community Edition license.)”
Do you see the paradox? How can you provide a testimonial on using WebORB Community Edition if you are applying to be able to download WebORB Community Edition in the first place?
To hell with them. If you’re looking for a good, free, stable solution Google for FluorineFX. It may not have all the bells and whistles of the WebORB Enterprise version, but it’s actually free and licensed under the GNU LGPL, so if you ever run into a bug and need to fix it the source code is available to you. And when you make a server change, you know FluorineFX will continue working instead of losing your license and being at the whim of the WebORB sales department while your production site(s) are offline.
Hi All,
I’ve recently posted a page on our website that describes the different WebORB modes of operation. That page can be accessed here: http://www.themidnightcoders.com/develop-ria/producteditions.html
Now to clear up some confusion about what is free and what is not free. When you download WebORB for .NET or WebORB for Java from our website, you are downloading WebORB Enterprise Edition running in development mode. (WebORB for PHP and WebORB for Rails are FREE open-source solutions, so the modes of operation don’t apply to these products.) WebORB running in Development Mode does not require a license key and it is FREE too. Your company can download as many copies of that as it has developers. You can develop with it for as long as you want and all without ever talking to anyone at Midnight Coders, including sales people. This download does have a 5 IP address limitation that should not be a problem if developers are working with their own local copy of WebORB. If the team needs to share a dev server and there are more than 5 developers, by all means, submit a request for a FREE Community Edition license. We just want you to have experience with the product before issuing a license, and yes, we do require your feedback because it helps us spread the word about WebORB. Remember, the keyword is Community and in a Community all members should help one another out and not simply take, take, take and not give anything back.
I think people, like Nick, who ask for a Community Edition license before they’ve even downloaded the product running in development mode are somewhat confused, possibly thinking that Community Edition will somehow be something different than WebORB running in development mode. Actually, what a Community Edition license does, once activated, is simply remove the 5 IP address limitation and blocks the clustering feature. You don’t need to download any different software, you just apply the license key to WebORB running in Development Mode.
If you think about it, we’ve given you a way to develop for free, a way to test for free and a way to go into production for free. Some companies are able to develop and test with WebORB running in development mode and can use Community Edition for their production machine. How is this not free? Other companies have greater requirements and so, yes, they do have to buy Enterprise Edition, but at a cost far lower than say…Live Cycle Data Services. As a “for profit” company, this is how we keep our doors open and continue providing some things for free and other things for a fee.
As for Nick’s comment, I suppose I could respect what he wrote if he were donating all of his development services for free, but I doubt he is so his whining really falls on deaf ears.
Cheers,
Kathleen