Australian IT - J2EE, .NET in slugfest

Some of you may have seen the article by Eric Wilson in Australian IT, entitled J2EE, .NET in slugfest

Good sensational headline.

I was even quoted in the article, which is nice.

What I didn't understand was Eric's point.

He quoted some data from an "unpublished Gartner survey", which states

"of the 107 companies questioned, ...... a whopping 71 per cent say they use, or plan to use, Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET programming environment".  

Hmmmm.

Then we have the following statement from a SUN Spokesperson -

"Sun Microsystems software business manager Laurie Wong says this is why Google chose AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) rather than .NET for its GMail service".

Huh??. What does AJAX have to do with J2EE?? AJAX is white hot at the moment, but it was implemented by Outlook Web Access years ago. As far as I know AJAX is not a J2EE thing, and it is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies together, and folks using ASP.NET can do the AJAX dance too. I don't get this comment, unless the person thinks that Javascript is Java, and we all know that is not the case, don't we?

Then Eric has a quote from a "Former J2EE developer"  who says

"relying on open source frameworks makes J2EE programmers unproductive, with up to 20 frameworks downloaded from the internet into each project."

Hmmmm again.

The article goes on with some comments by folks from both sides of the fence, as well as more comment from Gartner's unpublished report, but then it ended kinda abruptly. As I mentioned before I don't get the conclusion. Where's the promised slugfest? What was Eric trying to say?

Anyone know??

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