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["Michael D. Thomas" <mdthomas AT mindspring.com>]

I got a lot out of the TechEngage's J2EE vs. .NET shootout. Much appreciation
is due to the organizers!

Some observations/thoughts:

- The presenters were all world class and at the top of their game. Oracle
trained me for 6 months in the art of technical sales presentations, and I
worked in the field for a while before returning to software development.
Speaking from that experience, I was absolutely amazed at the level of skill,
composure, knowledge and ability the speakers showed. It's hard to give a
technical presentation. It's hard to give one in a big room. These guys were
competing for 3 hours and, in many cases, were creating presentations on the
fly. Seen as a sport, it was on par with the recent Carolina-Duke game.

- I'm biased towards J2EE, though I tech. edited some .NET books for Microsoft
Press and am familiar with the technology. The J2EE arguments were more
convincing to me, though MS made some good points.

- I learned the most from Marc Fleury from JBoss. First, he was challenging
everyone on the stage, including those on his J2EE 'team.' Here are a few of
his points that resonated with me:

- Microsoft has done some good innovation with C# b/c it is aspect oriented.
The J2EE community should learn from it.

- In the battle between implementation and specification, implementation wins.

- Open sourcers, not big corporations, should be controlling the standards.

- When asked one question -- about security, I think -- he just went to the
source code. No one else could do that.

- By quizzing the audience, he demonstrated that the .NET and J2EE
applications are mutually exclusive.

- He applied the math behind Brook's Law ("Adding developers to a late
software project makes it later") to the interoperability problem of different
vendors. As you add different vendors with their own quirky implementations,
you have to make those systems interoperate with all the systems already in
the industry. The number of interoperability problems that have to be solved
increases according to n(n-1)/2 -- the same equation governing Brook's Law.
The answer is obvious -- the industry needs standards.

- There was lots of talk about web services. Sang Shin from Sun said, "Web
Services are like teenage sex. All the teenagers say they are doing it, but
you can't find anyone actually doing it." Marc Fleury also made the point that
the web services market is vendor driven. I think an increase in B2B
integration is inevitable, but web services has some weaknesses. We'll see
more web services, but, come on, it's kinda silly to use text serialization on
the wire.

- .NET had some nice looking tools, and I know it is good for setting up web
services quickly. I suspect that MS will be able to focus a lot of energy on
areas like tools where the J2EE will have trouble competing b/c of J2EE
fragmentation.

- The multi-language support of .NET was a big point, but has always mystified
me. It's just not that hard to move between programming languages. MS was
trying to say that you could leverage working code from other systems in the
.NET CLR, which can run 40 or so languages. Even if the CLR works well, I
predict that such a solution would rarely be the best (and most
cost-effective) architecture for a new system.

- I think the argument about multi-language support might be compelling to
systems integrators.

- Technologies in the same space tend to converge -- i.e., VHS vs. beta. Don't
know if that would apply to programming languages. I think patterns is the
future, but that was tangential to the evening's discussion.

- Maturity was a big issue, as was Microsoft's habit of releasing poor
software for the first two versions.

- MS got beat up on security.

- The controversy about the .NET pet store benchmark was discussed. J2EE has
this pet store application that is meant to teach you about J2EE. Somebody put
together a .NET demo that was optimized for performance, and, surprise, the
.NET demo outperformed the J2EE demo. One of the J2EE presenters showed some
of the code from the .NET presentation and it literally drew laughs from the
crowd.

All I can think of for now.