Considering that Rickard Oberg, one of the original developers of JBoss
as well as one of the most influential open source developers around,
<doesn't buy it I would hold off passing judgement. Read more at
http://www.freeroller.net/page/rickard/20021029 and let's wait and see
what he comes up with.

I understand Rickard's distress but I wish he provided an example of
one of the lies he found in the report. I'm not going to spend time
combing through the application source code used, but I don't see
what TMC stands to gain by publishing such negative news, either
factual or factitious. Judging by face value, TMC has invested all
their eggs in one basket. They are pretty heavily dependant on
Java/J2EE for their consulting services.

The only thing I can guess at is that this is some type of marketing
ploy. I'm basing this off of the fact that they don't mention the app
servers used. They obvisously they don't want to burn any bridges
here with negative reviews of popular app servers but they do want to
spread the belief that there are problems. I bet that they'll come
up with the TMC optimized petstore pulling out all the stops. We may
be seeing a new wave of FUD coming out of TMC.

Give him some time - according to his weblog he is writing up his review
right now. I am sure that he will provide a fairly comprehensive
analysis of the items which he believes are lies or half-truths.

As to why TMC did it, I would have to say they are trying to brew
controversy. It drives people to the site and helps increase their
revenue. Who knows, maybe they will even offer classes or consulting on
how to "improve" the code like you suggested. Maybe they are going to
switch to covering .Net developments in the near future? Who knows?

The Apps are obvious....

App A was Weblogic 7.0
App B was IBM's Websphere


What I would have really wanted was for the test to be
conducted on one unified DB brand and also a on a .NET
vesion running on Red Hat Linux (lets see if M$ can
take up the challenge)

Also EJB's are a very HUGE over kill for a Pet Store
Application..