I'm a judge for the .NET vs. J2EE Smackdown Next Week
I've been asked to be one of the judges for next Monday's .NET vs. J2EE "Smackdown" event in Redwood Shores, which will have reps from Microsoft and Sun slinging code on stage. It ought to be a blast and apparently there are still plenty of seats available, so if you're in the Bay Area, check it out.
If you're worried that I'm hopelessly biased towards .NET as author of Thinking in C# (release candidate available for download), you may not know that in addition to being editor of Computer Language magazine, I was the first non-Sun employee to write a technical article on Java, wrote the Servlets Solution column for Java Pro, and led several EJB development projects. And really, referees don't do much except set up the challenges.
But what do you know? There's a reference to the Pet Shop in the preparatory material. As I wrote a few days ago, I think the Pet Shop Application must not be the basis for any real discussion of enterprise development productivity or performance. So I'm looking for alternatives: If you were me, what simple question or challenge would you present to best frame the questions of enterprise developer productivity and enterprise application performance?