[thelist] A sledgehammer when a hammer will do

[Ken Chase]

HI List!

I currently work in a large corporate environment who’s tech department
only supports J2EE/Oracle for Web application development. In many
cases, this makes small/medium projects cost prohibitive (project
managers, programmers, software, misc. overhead, etc).

My suggestion is that a second set of technologies could be supported
for smaller projects (for example PHP/MySQL or ASP/Access). This would
allow my area of the  organisation to allocate a higher percentage of
our budgets to new products/content development as opposed to
technology. To me it seems like we're stuck in the late 1990's when
technology ruled over business objectives.

I need to consider all aspects of this suggestion as I’m sure that
management types will find all kinds of reasons to shoot the idea down
(It's expensive to support multiple technologies, MySQL/PHP/Open Source
sucks, current staff aren't familiar with technology x, security issues,
Microsoft sucks, Cold Fusion is crap...). Basically, fear of the unknown
and anything to defend their initial decision to adopt J2EE/Oracle for
all projects.

Does anyone have examples of what other large corporations are doing?
People I can contact personally?

What are the hidden costs of Open Source?

Is developing/maintaining small Web applications in J2EE/Oracle
inherently more expensive than developing these same projects using
“smaller-scale” technologies?

Are J2EE/Oracle developers smarter/better/more skilled than other
developers?

Any comments, facts, links would be very appreciated. I will be putting
together a business case and will share it with the list when done.

All the best,
kenbo

P.S. I'm doing the Google thing but would like some first hand
knowledge.