I always try and remain technology neutral. When asked what technologies I would use I always say there are 2 choices:
- a J2EE with Linux or major vendor Unix on SQL Server, DB2 or Oracle.
- .Net stack on windows with SQL Server
and which to use depends largely on what skills you have.
OK – I know that there are many technologies around that in individual cases are probably a lot more suitable to address a particular problem – but I am involved in Enterprise development which means the technologies used need to be
- Well supported both today and in the future
- Have a large pool of developers available
- Are highly saleable
Recently I lend a hand to a team developing some reports using a product called JasperReports. I found the product itself to be great and in many ways more feature rich than Reporting Services that I normally use.
But then I started to look for help. It’s not that the help wasn’t there – it was – I just had to look much harder than on a Microsoft product. And it just isn’t so easy to use.
And that is where Microsoft do well. Often there products are not technically as good or they lag behind their competitors – but the tools and the documentation are usually better.
Compare Oracle to SQL Server. It’s been a long time since I used Oracle – version 8 I think it was, but I remember how hard it was to even connect to a database. The documentation was terrible. The tools were limited. From what I remember, the ESQL samples did not even compile properly – they had lots of typos in them!
Now, at the time, Oracle was probably a technically superior product, but it was much harder to use. SQL server has probably now caught up on the technology but, IMO, it was its use ability that made it a success.
I spent 10 years developing c++ and java on various UNIX systems, and yes, the tools are very good, but they are initially no where near as easy to use a Visual Studio and required the developer to have a “bag of tricks” up their sleeves.
