Blogging Roller

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: