Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

My personal beliefs about the validity of Gartner "studies" funded by the companies and industries they are "analyzing" aside, Gartner predicts that Sun Java and Microsoft .Net technologies will prevail on the web.

This one I agree with, but I dont think its much of a stretch. I think we are probably overlooking a segment of open source development, but that would be a minor oversight (such as PHP, Zope, Python, JOnAS, Enhydra, etc type products, some of these do fall into other overall categories, but are not Sun or Microsoft specific.)

The web will be built on Java, using J2EE technolgies such as enterprise beans and it will be built on Visual Basic and C# (thats still C pound sand.) If you were to ask me, this isnt a race, there arent to horses in it, theres one workhorse and one dog, but I wont get into that (well, at least not any further than I have.)

I think that Java technologies are FAR superior to Microsoft for many reasons, among them are cost, true portability and scalability and stability. The ideal web app environment, Apache in cooperation with the Sun JDK and the open source JOnAs EJB server architecture (and say MySQL or PostGRES). Basically that is a FREE J2EE implementation that will out scale and out perform the proprietary solutions. For my money its Java, but I would agree with the overall Gartner take on this issue just because of the current proliferation of Microsoft technologies (If all things are considered equal, and your personal bias, development staff, development tools, etc are not a deciding factor, you just decide based on what is the overall best, I think that that is clearly the Java solution, but hey, who am I to spit against the wind?)

Check the linked TechWeb article for real details.
NOTE the little prediction at the end of the article, another Gartner gem, " the death of Java as the primary development platform for handhelds by 2005" (take that however you want.)   Gartner Predicts .Net and Java: TechWeb