The Petstore Fiasco

Given all the known problems with the J2EE PetStore, you'd think that most people would avoid it like the plague. Instead, it seems to have become the focus of a weird competition between DotNet and JavaTwoEnterpriseEdition developers. Anyway, TheMiddlewareCompany? performed a series of benchmarks with an optimized version of the JavaLanguage PetStore against a MicroSoft-written .Net implementation. The results were shocking and in favour of .Net. It then emerged that the optimized version wasn't very well optimized and accusations and vitriol have been flying around ever since.

Apparently the .Net version had no exception handling to speak of and put significant amounts of logic into stored procedures. Yuck.

Relevant links

TheServerSide article: http://www2.theserverside.com/home/thread.jsp?thread_id=16149&article_count=654
Rickard Öberg's rebuttal: http://www.dreambean.com/petstore.html
The arrangements for a rematch: http://www.middleware-company.com/j2eedotnetbench/rematch.shtml
Commentary from one of TheMiddlewareCompany?'s people: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/2240