[nylug-talk] Why does "enterprise" imply "Java"?

[Peter C. Norton]

Dan,

Enterprise is a buzzword that means "if we pay alot, we don't have to
think through the problem as a problem, we just have to shell out
cash".

The notion of scaling is somewhat misleading in many cases, because
you have to ask not just "can it scale by a factor of N" where N is an
arbitrary number of servers, but can it scale by N * U, where U is a
number of users/clients/etc. Many times enterprise solutions are built
to scale across many systems, but since an overly-generic layering of
schemes was implemented, you can only attach, say, 10 users to a web
app on a $20k system. This is sometimes appropriate, but other times
you could accomodate hundreds or thousands of users on a $2k system if
you use something like... php. 

Usually when someone is selling something enterprise they are not
speaking to solving a particular problem for you, but providing you a
solution that is perhaps appropriate for a particular class of
problems, but at the same time doesn't necessarily save you either
time or money vs. any other solution. And sometimes they just don't
work as described. Rarely they do work in their intended purpose in a
bug-free long-term "stable" fashion. 

Examples of the more buzz-laden enterprise things that are very hard
to find a user for without millions in hardware and services are:

. Oracle applications
. Anything from CA
. Most java j2ee/beans/whatever application servers (all of them?)
. Microsoft exchange
. Any software from sun or HP
. Any clustering services

Sometimes this is reasonable. Java frameworks are there so you can
have things that you can customize, for instance, but they almost
never liberate you (or the person implementing it) from knowing how
they work. So to get what you need out of them you can almost never
just expect that they'll make a project work just as well as with a
more expensive developer, just that if you use them a good programmer
can save a lot of time in not having to re-invent that wheel.

-Peter

On Thu, Jul 06, 2006 at 02:15:46PM -0400, Dan Crosta wrote:
> 
> I was under the impression that "Enterprise" referred to the ability to
> scale to multiple machines, N-tier architectures, load balancing,
> distributing processing, etc. I haven't done any work with J2EE in any
> really methodical way (some JSP and Servlets a few years back as a side
> project), so I don't know if Java really fits that bill, or if that even
> has anything to do with the language vs. the environment and programming
> practice/convention/architecture. Maybe someone else can speak to Java's
> abilities in this regard?
> 
> dsc
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