Too Good to Beelieve?

With this news that Apache has released the Beehive, I decided to catch up on some Beehive-related reading.

Although this post from Ashith Raj is a couple of months old, he does a good job of looking at Beehive and the other vendors extensions to J2EE. Beehive (which was donated to Apache by BEA), is one of many extensions to J2EE that exist today--each vendor specific.

He goes on to makes a good point:

While the JCP continues to bicker over standards, innovation is continuing at the vendor level. As a result, customers will commit to a vendor-specific set of platform technologies or they will pay a huge cost in lost productivity.

Ashith makes a great point. And he doesn't mention the other all-important advantage .NET has over Java: you can write it using the world's most productive developer tools.

Seriously: if you're writing software, the quality of your tools is critical. And no matter what you say about the rest of their platform (and, I might add, that platform compares favorably with any other you can come up with), you can't deny that Microsoft's development platform is fantastic.