IBM has been trying to sell us websphere/JSP/EJB as our standard platform. they use a lot of buzzwords, but when I asked how many simo connections and what tps rate we could expect out of our mainframe running websphere/db2 I was told "We handled the nagano olympics with over 60 million hits in a weekend."
Ummmm. OK, but how about a transactional ecommerce system. They told me to look at their web site case studies. No solid benchmark numbers is a clue that a system is slow. After all, if websphere could handle 1000 simos at 100 transactions a second, on commodity equipment, you'd hear about it, right?
Throughout their presentation they told us how their market share is increasing, profits are up, all the unimportant stuff, but no hard numbers for anything except how fast their development programs are.
Where a friend works (one of those places that host about 1% of the web sites in existence) they tried websphere, and after three months of fighting to keep it up and running, they switched to BEA Weblogic and have found it faster, more stable, and much easier to write to and administer.
JavaServlets are much harder to get a handle on at first, and even with the faster JVMs out there, are no where near as fast as PHP.
I also got the feeling that the EJB thing is trying to do in java what should be done in a database or system layers.(i.e. transactions, failover et. al.)
The biggest issue is jobs. The fact is that while there are plenty of jobs out there, most of them are going to friends of friends who can be "spoken for" as good programmers.
