From: Parag Shah pshah@adaptivesoftware.biz Date: Tue, 02 Sep 2003 15:44:08 +0530 To:

I have been trying to research pro's and con's of building web based Project Management application using J2EE and LAMP. The main factors I am considerting are:

1. Speed of developement
2. Salary of programmers
3. Security

IMHO, J2EE and LAMP differ largely in scalability and complexity. J2EE is more targeted towards complex applications, while LAMP is more suitable for small - medium scale web applications.

Part of the reason is that J2EE has got way too many features to be applicable in all web-apps and the resources required to get the middle-ware up and running are much more. Get atleast a GB of RAM if you want to deploy on a J2EE app server like JBoss or WebLogic. That done, the application development model, especially EJB (quite similar to CORBA), is really powerful and flexible though it's not interoperable.

LAMP should be sufficient for a low complexity application and MySQL would be the first thing to become a limiting factor in load taking capacity, provided the hardware and network are capable enough. FYI, sourceforge.net is done in PHP with DB2 having replaced MySQL not too long ago. I guess LAMP would suffice for the Project Management Application.

Personally, I am also planning to look into C++ with XML as a platform for enterprise applications and web services. There are some really capable application development frameworks like ACE available for it. Generally, stuff that's available in J2EE is also available in C++. It's just that the former gets noticed since there's no c++.bigcorp.com. Oh, but my opinion may be biased due to my perennial rant against Java, the platform. ;)