Re:Who's Kool Aid have you been drinking? (Score 1)

This is true if you have the staff and the time to develop, deploy and maintain your system. And the problem is qualified staff who actually know what they're doing. The end result is it has become cheaper to throw in more hardware to support a less performant product that is easy to install and maintain than to pay more qualified staff to develop a solution based on performant products.

So what is the problem with Open Source? Well, great software but you need IT gurus to deploy and maintain it. Apache is a good example of that. With a good administration web front-end, I'd have no problem recommending it to my customers because they could do the administration themselves. At the moment, I tend to recommend iPlanet to have a good compromise between price, ease of use and reliability.

That's where J2EE comes into the picture. It provides you with the best platform you could think of to produce enterprise applications. You get out of the box one of the most comprehensive development APIs ever, developing EJBs or servlets is ridiculously easy and even deploying your application is a non-brainer (compared to the alternatives that is). That's what companies want to see: the promise of a short time to market provided they beef up the hardware a bit to support the architecture. At the end of the day, it's cheaper. And that's why I agree with the conclusion of this article: Open Source and Java/J2EE should be the best of friends, not ennemies. The best architecture I could think of in my job? A pure-Java merge between Apache, Tomcat and JBoss with an InstallShield-like installer and web-based admin GUI. That would be a killer app and I could recommend it to every one of my customers.