More than an open-source curiosity | Newsmakers | CNET News.com

More than an open-source curiosity | Newsmakers | CNET News.com "People always talk about the battle for the hearts and minds of developers, who choose between Microsoft's .Net and Java. Do you think Mono will attract Java developers to the .Net fold?
[Miguel de Icaza:] Today what's happening is that ASP.Net (Microsoft's system for building Web applications) is replacing, it's basically pushing J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) aside. We did a study at Ximian when we were trying to find customers for Mono. We found that people said that it was 25 percent more efficient to build in ASP.Net, because they have to do all this academic crap (with J2EE). Microsoft later funded a similar study and they came up with 30 percent. We interviewed about 25 customers about why would you buy Mono, why not J2EE, and we came up with that.
The problem with J2EE really is that it became very, very academic and the complexity of all these perfectly designed systems in schools does not necessarily map when you have deadlines and all kinds of other things. Twenty-five percent means we can develop it in a shorter time period. We can actually hire less people to do this thing. So those shops that spend $200,000 to $2 million say it's a one-year project. We are talking about relatively small shops--four or five developers or six developers to maybe 20 developers. If you can save 25 percent, it's a very big savings there. So, it's just because the technology is not as pretty as it could be or as nice as it could be, but it gets the job done. So, it's not Java's fault; it's more the framework has not been designed for these users."