The results of a very interesting study are out, where The Middleware Company compared these two Enterprise-class technologies by unleashing developers of each platform, working head-to-head to fulfil a (complex) specification. Link here. The (enormous) caveats are that: 1. The J2EE product used was IBM Websphere, not always the most-loved app server. 2. The study was sponsored by Microsoft! Now this study is interesting because these two technologies are aiming to solve the same problems, namely how to develop, deploy and maintain organisation-wide systems that are scalable and maintainable.

Having just read a presentation by one of the key developers at livejournal.com, about how they scaled up their technology as their userbase rocketed, I’m thinking about this site. Obviously not in a sense of it having anywhere NEAR as much traffic, but there’s certainly things I can do to improve performance. Particularly - and this is bad - there is no server-side caching, at least on the dynamic pages. Well, I knocked it up in a weekend so it’s not fully there yet!

It looks like Google really are attempting to take the online marketplace. They’ve just recruited one of the original figureheads behind Internet Explorer, along with a key coder who was working on the user interface for Longhorn. What have they got in mind? Well it appears on whois.org that they have registered the domain name gbrowser.com … Story here