Rickard Oberg

When it comes to promoting an opinion, an open source project, a software product or even a company, what constitutes crossing the line? Recently, on other message boards, JBoss Inc. employees were shown to have used multiple fake online personas to not only simulate community support for JBoss, but to denigrate competitors and even to attack individuals that criticized JBoss in public. The JDJ Readers' Choice Awards has become an annual ballot-stuffing initiative for many of the industry's leading vendors. On JRoller and other Java blogs, anonymous posters and fake personas push hidden agendas and hurl insults against competing interests with impunity. The line between what constitutes conventional marketing and market manipulation has been blurred, and the loser in all of this is you. This is not professional or ethical behavior. It hurts the industry's credibili... (more)

Review of "The Petstore Revisited: J2EE vs .NET Application Server Performance Benchmark"

The Middleware Company (TMC) recently published a benchmark report that compares the Sun J2EE PetStore with a functionally equivalent version created using .NET technologies. The J2EE PetStore version was improved from the original code by TMC employees, while the .NET version was written and optimized by Microsoft employees. As this summary will show, the report is seriously flawed. One of the big points of the report was that the initial benchmarks and comparisons were done with a version of the J2EE PetStore that was "not properly optimized for performance and not meant to be... (more)