Answering Joel Spolsky’s Questions On Enterprise Development

Joel Spolsky was asked four important questions on enterprise development. Joel didn’t offer a clear answer on some of them. Here is my take on all the questions.

“I wanted to get your response to some basic questions concerning technologies available for creating an enterprise level application that is built upon a Web Server, Web based applications, and a large distribution model and collection model. The project is starting from scratch and so there is no legacy code involved but other than that I won’t bore you with the details…”

1. “Would you head down the .NET route or J2EE?

J2EE. J2EE is based on cross-platform Java, which is the most popular language worldwide (read easy to hire developers and get expertise). It is completely free to develop and you can get quality IDE like Eclipse or Netbeans for free. Source code is available. There are tons of reasons but I will end here for brevity.

2. “Which Web Server (Apache, IIS, or something else) should we use and why?

Apache. Most popular, very stable, high performance web server, open source and very high quality.

3. “Which Web development language (ASP.NET, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Java, Python, etc.) would you recommend and why?

Java. Why?

4. “What do you use at your company and why?”

Java & J2EE. Why?