I guess this thread is mostly dead <g>, but I felt compelled to offer my 2c.
I recently had to do an analysis of development software I'm using for my boss to ensure that our licenses are up to date and whatnot. I was blown away by the fact that there's not a single piece of software critical to my development efforts that costs a dime. All of the tools and platforms I'm using for development, with the exception of Windows 2000 and Office 2000 are free. Even the OS and Office software could be free if I just took the time to switch. Granted our integration and deployment efforts are another story. We have to keep multiple OS's and app servers maintained to ensure our deployment works, but when you think about some 100 - 150 developers using a minimum $1000 - $2000 worth of software apiece that can all be replaced with quality software that costs nothing -- that's a significant cost savings. Now, the other issue is the integrated "drag & drop" development that is offered by MS. I personally wouldn't mind having that although it's not critical to me. In fact there's nothing more frustrating than being forced into workarounds because your tool doesn't give you low-level access to code. We used to do that crap in VB all the time. I don't know if .NET fixes that. The integrated thing seems more than possible for Java. Somebody just needs to do it. For me, the power of choice and platform independence that is offered by J2EE is worth the extra development effort it takes. In fact, I don't think we're expending any more effort with J2EE than we were with MS development a couple of years ago. Microsoft has always been good at taking someone else's idea and marketing it for themselves. I think .NET is the next iteration of that taken from J2EE. No doubt they'll be successful at it. But I think and hope that the Java community is large enough and strong enough to keep them from dominating the market like they have in other areas. If drag and drop, point and click integrated development is the only advantage they offer and it comes with the disadvantage of vendor lock-in, I'm certainly not going to switch for that... Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
