"Java is too hard for the masses, let alone J2EE," noted Yafim Natis, an analyst at Gartner. "Java and J2EE have significant penetration in the market for those with advanced technical skills. Vendors looking to expand their market want to bring the Java platform to the less advanced. They have to hide Java with tools that layer over Java."
"We hear significant pain from our customers," added Carl Sjogren [from BEA]. "J2EE is designed for making the most complicated applications possible to build, but there was little thought about making simple applications simple to build."
. . .
"If Rave can take away complexities for simple applications and Rave doesn't promise any more than to build simple apps really fast, all of a sudden you're talking to a crowd with a project that needs to get done, who instead of worrying about technology, just wants to write business logic. It doesn't matter if it's .NET or Java; they care about how many billable hours it takes."
. . .
"You need to provide a context that kind of developer can relate to; we've fundamentally simplified the concepts you need to be exposed to. Let's say I want to build a portal; we take care of the underlying J2EE detail. We don't talk about it as lower-level vs. higher-level developers, but rather developers associated with programming languages they know."
. . .
"[One of Java's advantages, however, is that] if you want to, you can use open source, you can have a free deployment environment," said Borland's Kratel. "If I'm a small shop I may not need the support levels that BEA or IBM would supply. I can take more risk, that's what Java provides. You don't have to turn to VB; you can do some very simple apps without a huge investment using Java."
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