Blasting
by Volker Weber
Harry Fuecks tries to blast J2EE and .NET while presenting PHP as the perfect choice :
Unless you haven't been paying attention, the big news these days is frameworks; namely Sun's J2EE and Microsoft's .NET.Both frameworks are (like any new technology) being promoted as the cure to any common IT ailment, particularily if you plan to start a global business trading in household pets.
The key concept being sold is N-Tier, as we examined in A Quick Intro to N-Tier, combined with notions of aggregating all your legacy applications, be they written in Java, C or even old IBM mainframe applications written in TPF, into a common platform, with aide of technologies like SOAP.
Of course both vendors offer a total solution "for all your needs". Although both frameworks claim use of open standards, each has a catch which potentially ties you to that vendor and gets you spending...and spending...and spending. With J2EE it's in the use of inter tier messaging standards only supported in Java. For .NET it's in the fine print: "Requires Windows".
David Heinemeier Hansson replies:
According to Fuecks, chosing JSP/Servlets for the presentation layer in a web application will bind you in darkness with "Vendor 'lock in' through use of inter-tier messaging protocols only supported by the J2EE standard".The reference implementation for JSP and servlets is the completely free and open source Tomcat server. And J2EE web-apps, especially if they're primarily JSP/Servlets-based, can easily be moved between the other open source and commercial implementations of the standard. Where's the vendor lock-in?
It's arguably even easier to move a properly packaged J2EE web-application from one engine to another than it is to do the same with a PHP web-app. As the latter is easily affected by different settings in Apache configs and the Linux/Windows differences.
There's apparently a "Lack of cheap, reliable and well supported platform for web deployment". First of all, PHP doesn't even offer a choice. There's one implementation of the language running on the Zend engine. Why not complain about that?
Developing against J2EE provides both excellent and heavily supported open source platforms (Tomcat, Jetty, JBoss) along with a string of commercial alternatives (BEA's WebLogic, IBM's WebSphere, and more). These allegations are outrageous, untrue, and unfounded.
But it gets worse.
Comments
Currently, both "More >" seem to link to vowe.net - would be nice to see that fixed, so we can read on :-)
Bummer. I published too early, that is before I inserted the links. They were just href="". Fixed.
A bummer. Right ;-)
[Keyword bummer: too bad Harry wrecks his site with those advocacy articles. The design category of patterns() is a really good resource, but all this oh-damn-look-how-glorious-PHP-is stuff just doesn't work.]
