No i’m not talking about frameworks that addresses their own unique business needs. I’m talking about your ORMs, MVC web frameworks, javascript (including ajax) frameworks, but for now i’m talking about your everyday java enterprise application. There is at least one of this monstrocities that is being build in every big company under the pretense of “We don’t need the other stuff that framework X offers”, or maybe you’ve heard of the priceless line “Framework X contains so much features that it can affect the scalability of our enterprise application”. So with those ammunition, management will give them a go signal to build their very own abomination; maybe 2 years down the line some moron will pick up a business magazine seeing those new fangled application servers and will decide that they have to migrate to it to keep up with the trend, and yes, you’ve guess it… their framework is not compatible with the new application server and they will have to spend several thousand dollars to port it. Standards and open source frameworks exists for a reason.

A few months ago I was doing some job hunting and i’ve come across some interesting job interviews in the process. Now I have a good mixture of full-time work and freelance work, and most of my freelance work consists of enterprise PHP web applications; while my full-time work primarily consists of J2EE and Oracle.

During the course of the interview when they are finished asking me the standard questions regarding my J2EE and Oracle experience, they focused their attention on my freelance works. I must say there is a really big ignorance with the LAMP stack in the enterprise world, opinions and questions that PHP is only a toy language and it cannot “scale” like their “100 concurrent users or the app server will choke” J2EE apps.  Now this opinions are nothing new, but it’s hilarious when you actually meet people with that opinion. If only they knew that sites like Digg, Facebook, Friendster were constructed with PHP albeit the web-part only, but like they say, right tools for the right job. I cringe everytime people construct simple intranet sites with full blown J2EE architecture thinking it would automatically scale because it’s Java/Oracle; apps that could have been simply done with a LAMP stack and 1 week.