Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, a large manufacturing company spent many months and an untold fortune on a system to print RFID tags for their product labeling. IBM was entrusted to make the technical recommendations. Here’s what they had to work with:

The company as a whole is an International mega-corporation, whose primary source of technology is Microsoft. The engineering division contains a small group of Java programmers who write mostly Swing applications. They have a couple servlet apps, and recently introduced their first JSP app (although only two programmers have any JSP knowledge). They have never used J2EE (in fact I doubt anyone would be able to accurately describe J2EE). They deploy only to Windows (even their servers run on windows).

So based on that, what do you suppose IBM’s recommendation would have been?

A J2EE app running on Linux using a front end based on Portlets? Sure! Why not? When all you sell is hammers…