It has been a week now since the TSS published The Petstore Revisited, but
I am just now getting around to reviewing the story.
On Monday Oct. 28, 2002, The Server Side published (TSS)
The Petstore Revisited.
This benchmark report compared Sun's
example J2EE Petstore application
with some performance revisions added by TSS to a Microsoft written dot-Net
clone of the Petstore. Respected open source Java guru Rickard Oberg
quickly reviewed the report, found many flaws, and
published a rebuttal the very
next day. Rickard updated his rebuttal with more information and links to
other's views throughout the week (but he missed
Rafe's comments).
On Wednesday he was
Slashdotted.
As the week progressed, the outcry continued, and the full story was revealed:
- the benchmark report was seriously flawed in many ways,
- the J2EE Petstore performance revisions done by TSS were inept at best,
- Microsoft paid TSS to do the benchmark,
- TSS is essentially a Microsoft business partner,
- and TSS worked with Microsoft to coordinate the dot-Net victory media
spin.
If you take the time to read Rickard's review and the comments that he links
to, it is clear that dot-Net did not defeat J2EE, but Microsoft certainly
did lay waste to The Server Side's reputation. The TSS benchmarks taught
us nothing about the relative merits of dot-Net and J2EE, instead we learned
about incompetence and betrayal.
If you are concerned about the relative performance of dot-Net and J2EE,
read the
Pet
Shop Boys write-up at Larry O'Brien's
Thinking In Dot Net weblog:
Every indication that I have seen is that,
currently, the two platforms are quite comparable in run-time performance of strictly comparable code. In my experience, one of the two platforms displays a small performance advantage in the majority of programs, a performance advantage which I absolutely, positively believe to be irrelevant to the issue of business performance in an enterprise-level application.