Like others have said, it's never the equipment, it's always the rider
(oh wait, that's a mountain biking analogy). I find myself in peculiar
position in which I can empathize with both sides of this situation.
I have been Microsoft developer since 1995. I recently found myself
looking for work after my company succumbed to gross mismanagement. I took
up shop with a mentor of sorts who owned his own consultancy, the problem was
that he was a J2EE guy all the way. In years past, I'd come on board with
him in my spare time when there was only an MS solution, and he didn't want
to turn away from a potential relationship. My first big project with him,
was to team up with an MCP hosting Co. that dabbled in development to develop
a data warehouse. This was just a step on the way to getting a much larger
contract that was to be a Web Order Entry system in Websphere that tied back
to J.D. Edwards. With the contract secured, there were many architectural
decisions along the way, and there's an odd enough mix of technologies
between MS products and J2EE that I'm beginning to feel uniquely qualified to
speak on this subject, because I feel that I've let down my prejudices. On
one side, I have the MCP and on the other, the J2EE guy and they constantly
battle over which product camp best suits our objectives. IMO, it all boils
down to platforms, and in some cases how much a third party tool might cost.
For instance, I had been asked to develop a solution to convert an AS/400
spool file that had been stuffed into a BLOB in SQL2K over to a PDF. We went
from J2EE (scrapped because of Adobe's high price for LiveCycle), to VB
(Persits AspPDF - a great product BTW) back to J2EE (Open Source XML PDF
forms). Both the VB and Open Source J2EE solutions work great, it just so
happened that J2EE made more sense in this case and was worth the wasted
hours building the VB app for the lessons learned (the customer was aware of
and approved of our decision). To look at development as all or nothing when
it comes to this issue, is to start limiting your potential. I have worked
very hard at becoming as proficient in Java as I am in VB/C++ which hasn't
been easy since it gets in the way of life so much and would be so much
easier to just stick with what I already know. Both technologies have their
place, and technically speaking, both products make each other better.
Kelman, in your situation, I'd be leary. From your posts it sounds
like someone was successful in blaming the equipment, which suggests that
person is still around (I could very well be wrong). If that person is still
around, the next time he/she needs an excuse, the equipment one's already
been used, and if I'm right about this, that person will shift blame for
their next failure which may come your or your associates' way. Be careful.
"Kelmen Wong" wrote:
Though I been many spent many years onto M$ tech for development, this
will probably be the end of my pilgrim on it.
My employer is practically switching to J2EE now, as the last .NET
project give us some real nasty shits in the client production sys,
hence gone the faith of .NET in it.
