In October 2003, Crossvale (a research firm) published a report entitled “A Study in Enterprise Development Productivity”, subtitle “Comparing Implementation Approaches with J2EE API coding vs. Using a J2EE Development Framework”.
This report has been widely circulated by BEA as evidence that WebLogic is better than Websphere. However, in reviewing the report I found that they were really comparing the benefits of using advanced tooling to generate code rather than coding major portions by hand.
My conclusion was that BEA's WLW (WebLogic Workshop) may offer some improvements in our project delivery time, it also required a significant change in our infrastructure, and more importantly would require us to abandon our vendor neutral position.
On May 19 of this year, BEA announced that portions of WLW will be released to the open source community via Apache. The first code releases would be available later this year. It is a little early to gage the importance of this development. But given good market acceptance, this may be an importance addition to our tool set.
References
The Crossvale report
BEA Beehive Press Release
ZDNet News article
