The Java Pet Store application provides typical e-commerce functionality: various views of products and services, order taking, credit card processing, shipping information, and so on. Initially, the Java Pet Store application was created by a Sun developer as a means of displaying all the various features of J2EE technology. The first implementation contained 14,273 lines of code and took six months to develop.

Following the successful deployment of the Java Pet Store application, Microsoft engineers decided to use the reference application to show off the capabilities of C# and .NET, and carefully rewrote the application using 3,484 lines of hand-crafted code.

By contrast, a single developer has created an Ace specification of the Pet Store application consisting of just 224 lines of hand-written code--less than one tenth of the size of the Microsoft version. The Ace Pet Store application can be deployed using either a 2-tier or a 3-tier architecture. Best of all, the new Ace specification took Sun's developer only a week to complete.

I wonder if this is not a case of fitting the chip to the benchmark.

Further, they have shifted what could normally be in libraries into an IDE it seems. This is "hiding" lines of code, and may limit flexibility. At least with code, you can copy and change it if the generic version turns out not to be as generic as hoped.

It is easy to make tools to generate typical add/change/delete/list screens. However, the devil is in sticky customizations and tuning UI naunces to fit finicky users or PHB's.

Overall, the article is very brochuree. They promised the very same crap with the very stuff they are attacking here to justify their "new" solution. It is like MS bashing Windows 95 to justify Windows 98, and then bashing 98 with the very same claims to justify W2K, etc. (Faster, self-configuring, crash-proof, more toys, etc.)

One part says something like, "This will finally deliver on the promise of write-once-run-everywhere and code reuse that Java originally promised." (paraphrased)

The marketing treadmill never stops.