A great story in e-Pro Magazine by Jim O'Donnell entitled "Some Say Don’t Make That Domino to Java Move Just Yet" - this one is a must read for anyone who believes as I do, that the J2EE dreams at IBM are way ahead of the curve. I believe I heard it described best (I'll name the person when I can have permission) described the push for websphere and J2EE as less "Demand Pull" and more "Supply Driven" -- its being pushed by those who gain the most by its use.

I'm not saying j2ee isn't great stuff -- for transactions, for enterprise critical stuff that scales to the millions of transactions per minute it looks pretty cool. But for day to day application development solving departmental business needs on the ground, it does not yet provide the right tools. Perhaps it will in the future. IBM is sure committed to it.

Anyway, some quotes from that article -- I don't want to quote too much, you should read the article. Admittedly, I think Mark Dixon probably has a lot to gain by continued use of the Domino platform and is probably as biased in this as am I -- but I still like his comments. Ken Bisconti's are more interesting to me, because what he says essentially can't be too far out of line with the internal party line at the Glorious Peoples Republic of IBM. He is after all, very much one of the Blue People.......
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"Any move to a Java infrastructure is too costly and complicated to be practical at this point"
"The long-term future has to be standard based on J2EE or .NET, but that’s likely a long time away"
-- Mark Dixon
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"We hope developers are not getting directions that all applications now have to be built on one platform. It’s about using the right tools for the job smartly"

Lotus clearly has no interest in pushing developers from Domino to WebSphere or other Java platforms, according to Ken Bisconti, vice president of Lotus Workplace products. The application development space is complex, he explained, and there’s no simple, single answer to developers’ questions about the best technology to use.

-- Ken Bisconti