J2EE vs. .

NET
How One ISV Made the Choice

W H I T E P A P E R

Discover the Value

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 Table of Contents

Introduction ............................................................................................................... 3

Background .............................................................................................................. 3

Research Summary ................................................................................................. 3

What .NET vs. J2EE Means to the Consumer ......................................................... 4

What .NET vs. J2EE means to the ISV .................................................................... 6

Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 7

Not to be reproduced or distributed without the express, written consent of Relevant Business Systems, Inc. 2
 Introduction
The .NET vs. J2EE argument often takes on the fervor of a religious debate,
usually with software developers heatedly pitched against corporate IT. Decidedly
in favor of one platform over the other, each camp prefers what tends to work best
in their domain. But, while internal debates can be heated, the choice of one
technology over the other is virtually life threatening for independent software
vendors (ISV) selling to a non-homogenous or platform-agnostic target audience.
Choosing one is betting the farm; choosing neither forces unwieldy workarounds
or unrealistic duplicate development efforts. Relevant Business Systems, an enter-
prise software provider about to embark on a major round of product development,
recently announced that they will use J2EE in all future product enhancements.
Their approach, research, and ultimate choice illustrates the typical ISV dilemma.

Background
Relevant Business Systems is a twenty-year old software firm providing enterprise
software specifically architected for project-oriented businesses in the Aerospace
& Defense, Maintenance Repair & Overhaul (MRO), and Contract Manufacturing
industries. Although Relevant lists some of the premiere firms in A&D and Contract
Manufacturing among its clients, existing and targeted customers also encompass
much smaller firms. Relevant was very concerned that their platform choice would
be acceptable to multiple tiers of their target industries and that it would meet all
their own requirements for usability, functionality, performance, and cost. Besides
doing some first-hand research by creating both .Net and Java applications in-
house, Relevant believed effort was required to present the rationale behind their
decision clearly and concisely so that all Relevant decision makers, as well as
those in the customer base, could see that Relevant was proceeding on the best
possible path. To ensure that Relevant’s evaluation didn’t just replicate existing in-
house prejudices, Relevant started from scratch: first gathering the available
information on each technology from external product reviews, evaluations, and
analyst briefings, then examining their key end user concerns and, finally, reweigh-
ing their own requirements in light of those of their customers’.

Research Summary
Relevant found that Microsoft’s .NET was well regarded on several fronts. Most
experts acknowledge Microsoft as the leader in desktop productivity applications,
with GUI-rich operating systems that excel in front end development. Microsoft’s
comprehensive framework includes an excellent integrated development environ-
ment (IDE) within which developers can create rich user interfaces. Tightly inte-
grated into Microsoft operating systems, .NET gives developers significant options
for user interaction. NET’s framework permits development in a multitude of
languages (compiling byte code to an internal language in runtime), so there can

Not to be reproduced or distributed without the express, written consent of Relevant Business Systems, Inc. 3
 be greater re-use of skill sets. Extensibility in .NET is inherent, since it’s built
around web services. And, overall development costs may be cheaper in .NET,
as the application server is built into the server platform.

Controversies surrounding .NET include its inability to run on operating systems

other than Windows, recent and significant changes to tools (including .NET, VB
.NET, C#, ASP+) requiring additional user education, the relative immaturity of
the platform, and forced reliance on Microsoft for platform development and
standards.1 Lastly, the most significant question regarding .NET centers on its
scalability and stability.

J2EE is often strong where .NET is weak. It will run on any operating system from
Windows to UNIX to Linux. It has proven ability to scale and handle very high
volume transaction applications. With many features built in for enterprise applica-
tions (session management, fail-over, load balancing, and application integration),
Java has been favored for enterprise application development for years. Virtually
every high transaction volume data transformation (ETL) or application integration
(EAI) product developed in the past five years has been built using J2EE, including
those from IBM, HP, and Oracle. The entire Java community reviews J2EE platform
specifications, and all input is reviewed, weighed, and analyzed before it can
become standard. A large number of companies influence the make up of the
platform, which ensures that no one company can manipulate the specification to
advance a specific agenda. On the downside, J2EE is more complex than .NET,
and its GUI environment is much more limited2 .

What .NET vs. J2EE Means to the Consumer

Relevant customers, as well as other corporate buyers, are typically concerned
with five major, frequently overlapping, issues when examining the technology
behind any potential software purchase: deployment platform, scalability, extensi-
bility, the IT resources that will be needed to support the application, and finally,
the total cost of ownership.

• Deployment Platform
This is typically governed by existing house skill sets and corporate standards.
Organizations with resources with heavy Windows and SQL Server skills may
be reluctant to invest time and money in deploying and managing a UNIX
environment with a different database, such as Oracle, Informix, or DB/2.
Many times IT resources are scarce, and even if a budget for training is avail-
able, the organization’s resources simply don’t have the bandwidth to manage
another platform. With larger enterprises, the investment in Windows, UNIX,
and mainframe technologies co-exist, but corporate standards may dictate that
all enterprise applications must be deployed on one specific flavor of UNIX. In
either case, a specific platform is required for the enterprise application. If the
required platform is Windows, then it doesn’t make a difference from the

1
Carol Silwa, ComputerWorld, May 20, 2002.
2
Ibid.

Not to be reproduced or distributed without the express, written consent of Relevant Business Systems, Inc. 4
 consumer’s standpoint whether the technology behind the application is .NET
or J2EE. On the other hand, if the required platform is UNIX, then J2EE is
required.

• Scalability and Performance

The ability of an application to scale and perform acceptably is essential to
ensuring that a business can run and operate productively. Since ERP pack-
ages typically have an eight to ten year implemented life span, it is crucial that
an application be able to meet the needs of the business at the time it is first
implemented and well into the future. If an organization chooses a technology
that supports a current user base of fifty but will be inadequate for five hun-
dred, company growth can be accompanied by crippling slow downs, as well
as the unexpected cost of selecting and implementing a new solution. Gartner
states that .NET is the best choice for applications with 100 or less users,
and while they appear ambivalent when users number between 100 and 299,
Gartner highly recommends J2EE as the only choice when the user count
rises above 3003 .

• Extensibility
The ability to easily integrate one application into another has become far
more important in the last five years. ERP applications were originally devel-
oped to bring all software and data into a single environment. This premise
was flawed. Applications, such as payroll, PDM, and many others, continue
to be run outside of the ERP system. Still other applications that provide
additional reporting and analytics capabilities have been added on top of ERP.
Lastly, e-business applications were added to extend the business beyond the
firewall. All applications designed to work in conjunction with the ERP create a
greater need for application and data integration. Any application must be able
to communicate with external applications easily and simply. Since a great
deal of the cost of implementation is often actually that of integration, extensi-
bility has significant cost, as well as performance, ramifications. Applications
that embrace a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and provide standard
Web Services (SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI) significantly reduce the complexity
and cost of integration. .NET was built with SOAP as a core data transfer
protocol4 . Although J2EE was drafted prior to the immergence and adoption
of Web Services, the market has responded with an enormous amount of
Web Services tools and applications. At this point, applications developed
with either .NET or J2EE can take advantage of SOA and Web Services,
and answer the extensibility question effectively.

• Resources and Costs

Costs to an organization vary depending on whether the company implement-
ing the software solution needs to develop within the chosen architecture or
not. If development is a factor, resource costs will come into consideration.

3
Ibid.
4
This is not necessarily the best choice, as SOAP is comprised of XML over HTTP, which is not the
fastest data transfer protocol.

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 According to PayScale.com, .NET resources are 6.7% cheaper than corre-
spondingly skilled J2EE developers5 . In an ERP personalization and custom-
ization context, this difference will be somewhat mitigated. In addition, when
development tools are provided for the end user, little of the underlying devel-
opment language is required (much is abstracted from the user by an IDE).

Infrastructure costs are fairly close regardless of the platform chosen (e.g.,
deploying a web-based application on a Windows 2003 Server running on
Intel-based hardware infrastructure results in virtually identical costs). Stan-
dard applications servers are either built-in (Windows) or free (J2EE’s Jboss)6 .
If other application server pieces such as Microsoft Commerce Server are
added on, Microsoft becomes a more expensive solution. Alternatively, if a
different application server is chosen in the J2EE world (such as BEA’s
WebLogic) J2EE will become a more expensive application.

What .NET vs. J2EE Means to the ISV

Like most ISV’s, Relevant wanted the best overall platform for its product offering
both in terms of performance and marketability. Translated into features, that
meant: platform acceptance in their target market and in the software industry in
general; scalability and performance, ease of development, and robustness; and
reasonable costs.

• The Target Market

Relevant’s target customers range from small to mid-size (defined by Relevant
as 20 to 100 users) to large (200 to 1000+ users). At the smaller end of the
scale, their customers tend to prefer the Microsoft Windows server platform,
while larger customers gravitate to UNIX. Many customers have server stan-
dards dictating the enterprise platform. On the critical criteria of acceptance
in the target market, J2EE, which allows a single application to be deployed
in multiple environments, was deemed far less restrictive.

• The Software Industry

Although investors and software industry analysts (AMR, Gartner, etc.) are
universally concerned with application platforms and expect certain platforms
for software development, both .NET and J2EE are well accepted by the
software industry.

• Scalability and Performance

Relevant’s enterprise software equally addresses the requirements of sites
supporting as few as thirty or as many as several thousand users. Given the
typical installed life span of an ERP system, this is a key Relevant product
advantage. Relevant wanted to ensure that their choice of underlying technol-
ogy would preserve and enhance their product’s ability to gracefully scale to

5
www.payscale.com
6
http://www.jboss.org/index.html

Not to be reproduced or distributed without the express, written consent of Relevant Business Systems, Inc. 6
 growing customers’ needs. Consequently, Gartner’s conclusion that J2EE was
the only viable choice for large numbers of users weighed heavily in Relevant’s
considerations. (Gartner has indicated they will re-analyze .NET’s scalability
in 2008, but they do not anticipate that .NET will have evolved to meet the
demand until then7 ). Accordingly, Relevant concluded a choice of J2EE was
definitely preferable on this measure.

• Ease of Development and Robustness

With a good product specific IDE and plug-ins, Relevant believed their cus-
tomer base would be able to develop easily with either .NET or J2EE. For their
own development, Relevant found J2EE be far stronger on the server side,
where most of their development is done. In addition, J2EE afforded the
additional benefit of allowing a developer access to more of the underlying
technology. .NET’s many built-ins decrease the necessity for third-party tools,
but ample availability of tools and plug-ins for J2EE minimize this advantage.
Relevant found .NET to be less robust for complex application development.
In addition, the .NET platform was judged more prone to viruses and worms.

• Costs
Neither solution has significant infrastructure management costs. Resources
are abundant for both platforms, although very highly skilled resources are
easier to find on the J2EE platform due to its maturity. As mentioned above,
.Net resources offset Java’s availability superiority with a slight cost advantage.

Conclusion
The effort required to fully vet their technology choice paid off at Relevant. In the
end, virtually all key stakeholders found it fairly easy to select J2EE for the overall
ERP development architecture. As an ERP developer marketing to companies
ranging from mid-size manufacturers to large scale multi-national enterprises,
platform independence and scalability were the key issues. By selecting J2EE,
Relevant Business Systems ensured that its applications would be deployable on
a variety of platforms, enabling their customers to support Relevant’s application
on the platform that they were most familiar and comfortable with. The tools and
technologies available in J2EE will make Relevant applications easy to deploy,
integrate, and manage. The availability of UNIX operating systems provides
increased uptime and reliability for Relevant’s customers and the applications are
built to scale in order to meet the needs of Relevant’s larger and rapidly growing
enterprise class customers.

7
Yefim Natis, Vice President, Research Director, Gartner Inc. Conference on Application Integration and
Web Services, Chicago, October 29, 2002.

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 Relevant Business Systems, Inc.
Two Annabel Lane, Suite 215 • San Ramon, CA 94583
800.473.5382 • FAX: 925.867.3840
web site: www.relevant.com
e-mail: relevant@relevant.com

J2EE vs. .NET–Version 1.1; 09/04