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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Register back on track [WebTech]

Congrats to Andrew on his J2EE vs .NET update. I'm not entirely sure about the conclusion of his comments though:

What Öberg does establish is that Microsoft wrote its .NET Pet Store for speed, while Sun wrote its Pet Store to show programming techniques. We really do need a neutral party to establish some transparent benchmarks for this kind of exercise.

Benchmarks are a sad game. Even in an apparently uniform space such as processor performance they are hard to trust. For example, the contrast between x86 and SPARC architectures means that higher clock speeds don't necessarily mean better application performance. One might conceive of a benchmark for J2EE implementations (after all, there are plenty of them and they are all by definition architecturally similar).

But in a space where there is a radical architectural and implementation gulf, I struggle to see how one can even use the word 'benchmark'. What we really need here is a recognition of the fact that customers choose between J2EE and .NET for reasons other than performance. They are after vendor choice, or application selection ease, or some other benchmark-proof attributes - it's like choosing between a Mac and a PC. So to even attempt to reduce the discussion to the levels that the TMC Petstore Fiasco attempts is an insult to real customers.

posted at 10:29 PM (UK) | |