Business logic layer - what to use?

[Alan Jackson]

Just one more stick on the fire. Last year I heard a talk by a fellow
who I have a lot of respect for, where he said that at his company he
has had them start doing all their programming in Java, even the
compute intensive stuff. He is a technical manager at BHP petroleum. And
when he says compute intensive, he means it. He also said that his
old friends at Los Alamos (where he used to work) are using Java for
comnpute intensive apps, because the performance hit is small enough that
it is worth it in terms of being able to code up things more quickly.

It sounds to me that with a little care and the right JVM, Java is competitive
with C++. It doesn't really surprise me. I read a study about a year ago
comparing C, C++, Perl, Python, Java, and Rexx. While C code was, on average
faster than than perl, the difference was only a factor of 2. They had many
programmers code up the same problem, and discovered that the spread in
performance between programmers was greater than between languages. That is, a
good perl programmer would write code that was faster than that written by a
below average C programmer. My take away was that unless you are working on
real-time systems, or massively compute intensive or some other constraint like
that, ease of programming and skill level should drive language choice.

-- 
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| Alan K. Jackson            | To see a World in a Grain of Sand      |
| alan at ajackson.org          | And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,         |
| www.ajackson.org           | Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand |
| Houston, Texas             | And Eternity in an hour. - Blake       |
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