To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Very interesting. I can remember as we developed some "heavy" (about 15 mio. code lines) distributed enterprise applications with 1.3 (or was it 1.4?) it was pretty impressive how better on the server side JDK from IBM was. It was much more stable, less buggier, code much cleaner and able to use 4GB of RAM on AIX. Not sure about speed performance. I think Sun was better on that one. However it was never a problem for big companies, where new/more hardware is the answer.
Having dealt with IBM on the same front/scale of project, I think the key part of your statement is "AIX". There is no Sun JVM on AIX (or at least - there wasn't back when I was working with it in '03). How can you compare the stability/bugginess/code cleanliness/etc of a non-existant package with an existing package?
Not getting into specifics, but I've dealt with IBM's older (Websphere/HATS/etc) stacks and their more recent stuff, and I've had a lot of "strange" things take place. Almost as a counter-point to your post, I've found Sun's Java much more stable assuming I stuck within the constraints of the provided libraries. Slapping in all kinds of third party frameworks into the mix can complicate things a bit. :p
That said, you won't see me running this SDK anytime soon!
Edited 2007-01-24 01:14





Member since:
2006-12-14
I just ran though some quick benchmarks, and it came out pretty well against sun's java6. IBM's came out ahead in every benchmark I put it through. Not by the extent that it did back in the day, but it's still nice to see this kind of thing.