Microsoft’s Connected Systems Division released the results of a benchmark study that showed that applications based on WCF Web services outperformed J2EE applications running on WebSphere (ver 6.1.07) by as much as whopping 285 percent! Woah! From a cost point of view, the .NET solution is supposed to be one-fifth of the IBM Java solution. For the study four core tests were benchmarked, namely:

  1. Web Services: Remote activation of back-end services from the front-end Web application.
  2. Durable Messaging: Orders placed via transacted/durable queue in loosely-coupled architecture.
  3. Non-Durable Messaging: Orders placed via a non-durable/non-transacted queue.
  4. Monolithic: All elements of application run in a single JVM or CLR instance, no Web Services or messaging. In this mode, orders were set to be placed synchronously.

Of course, given this is released by Microsoft there will be some bit of skepticism, but feel free to check out the details (PDF) - 10.3 mb and 92 pages of both the study and the results.