Another J2EE vs .NET Performance Comparison

Starting yesterday, we received a bunch of story submissions about a performance comparison between J2EE and .Net. It didn't seem all that exciting, and we sort of ignored the story. But as usual, it appears that some people take issue with the methodology and conclusions.

Comments

Much more interesting - a leaner JPetStore

[slamb]

jPetStore is worth checking out. These people decided that the J2EE pet store is way too complex, which I'm inclined to agree with. They produced, using Jakarta Struts, a Java pet store web application that is much leaner. It's comparable in size to the .NET pet store but better in several ways - there's no SQL embedded in the code, there's no HTML embedded in the database, no code was automatically generated, and it's MVC-based.

I've always thought that Enterprise Java Beans are overengineering to the extreme. It's nice to have something to back that up with now. There's no question in my mind that this JPetStore beats out both the original J2EE one and the .NET one in maintainability.

They didn't do any benchmarks - performance wasn't what they were going for - but it would be interesting to see some. I'd be inclined to believe this simpler approach would also have much better performance than J2EE.

Re:Save your time

[interiot]

Actually, it's the other way around. Look at the PDF, page 40.

• The Middleware Java Pet Store 2.0 implementation uses the same basic EJB-recommended architecture as the original Java Pet Store (except fully optimized for performance). Hence, its code count remains largely unchanged over the original at 14,004 lines of total code.

• With the .NET Pet Shop 2.0 implementation, Microsoft has done some further optimizations to reduce its overall line count, while also extending the application with new features for distributed transactions and Web Services. The new .NET Pet Shop 2.0 contains a total of 2,096 lines of C# code (the 1.5 version had a total of 3,484 lines of code, a 40% reduction).

This is covered right away in the rebuttal, as there seem to be some tricks played to get the discrepancy so large.

Did no one read the other article linked to?

[j3110]

I've been using J2EE now for a while, and they made some hideous performance mistakes. The #1 mistake they made was BMP. BMP, for those of you who don't know, is an object persistance model where each object manages it's own storage. It's pretty obvious that for N rows of a database that map to N objects, you will need N SQL statements. That's just wrong and bad. Not only is it the slowest way to access the database, but it requires 10x the amount of code to work with. The other two (common) choices are CMP and JDBC in session beans (others are JDO and other ADO-ish Java API's that wrap JDBC). CMP would require 1 SQL statement to retrieve N rows, and requires no SQL be written, works on all RDBMS's, and you only have to write a skeleton object. It's about a magnitude of 3 faster than CMP. Directly connecting from the Session beans(pretty much a CORPBA object) will make you write your own SQL, but will increase performance yet further(since you can use stored procedures or just do mass updates and still maintain database independance).

The next thing they did is exclude JBoss, one of the most popular J2EE servers. It's open source, and easy to use. One can only conclude the intentionally left it out because .Net could never hold up to best price/perf. against free. JBoss may not be a speed deamon(it's not slow at all though), but if you disable debugging(on by default), use IBM JDK 1.3.0 and MySQL with innoDB, it will easily win price/performance.

After reading that TMC had taken money from MS, the only conclusion that I could come up with is that it was rigged. No real J2EE expert would ever make those mistakes. Even free E-Books on TSS will tell you not to make mistakes like that.

Basically, this really hurts the Java community to see TMC take stabs at J2EE after all it's put into it. Either that or we are to conclude that TMC is unfit for the J2EE educational services they offer. Either way, they may have helped .Net get a foothold, but they are loosing theirs fast.

Anyone that doesn't know that much about J2EE or doesn't take a look at the code will think this is like the florida recount fiasco, but it really is a legitamit claim that this version of the petstore was really written by A) a monkey, or B) a MS fundee.