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�