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When Should We Ditch Our Platform?
odoketa writes "My organization recently had to replace our Web developer. It took us an extremely long time to find someone with the necessary skill set. I don't know if this is because of the platform we are running (which I will leave nameless), or simply because the fates conspiring against us. It's easy to assume that languages or platforms are popular based on buzz, but the rubber hits the road when you have to hire someone to maintain that code. How are folks out there determining when you've backed the wrong horse, and getting back on track?"
I do believe the original question was how do you know when you're off-track, rather than asking if he should drop his specific technology.
Using the shoe analogy, I'd probably say that if she shoe was comfortable, wasn't breaking down after a week of use, and people weren't openly ridiculing your choice of footwear, then your brand should be fine. If it wasn't comfortable but everything else checked out, I'd suggest a different type of shoe regardless of brand. If it was breaking down immediately, hell yes get another brand, and consider spending more than $15 bucks next time. If people are laughing, then you venture into a whole new line of questioning.
Through that whole thing, I don't need to know what brand you wear now. If I did know, I could give you better advice, but what if you were wearing a brand that might not be popular on a particular forum? You would have to separate out the BrandX-haters who make reasonable arguments from people who honestly don't care but have a low opinion of that specific brand.
Which proves the man is running a Microsoft product, because he's hiding something. Only MS can produce that level of guilt.
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
I sympathize. However, that is hatred for J2EE, not Java. I stuck with JDK 1.1 until last year just to keep away from J2EE. However, I've found that you can safely ignore that crud, and just use core stuff. It doesn't affect startup time thanks to the classlib precompiler introduced in Java5. (In theory, you can create your own custom compiled classlib minus the crud to save memory also, but the memory isn't an issue anymore with current hardware.)