Crossvale has produced a report comparing the productivity between WebLogic Workshop (WLW) and IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD). They explain a lot what they do, and why they do it this way, while developping and enterprise grade application. To my taste, they fail to mention strongly certain points.

Why so little line of codes with WLW?

WLW uses BEA's Javelin, which combines a source code parser, an attribute based code generator (XDoclet based) and a compiler. They choose for WSAD to not use an attribute based code generator, because they insist on using stock products.

What can I do with my application developped with WLW 8?

Run it on WebLogic Server, end point. Even if BEA provides a Page Flow Portability Kit, there is no such thing for the Controls. The application developped in WSAD needs minor tweaks on EJBs to be ported to another J2EE server, as usual, but nothing prevents you to do that.

Why explain in such great length that they don't use Entity Beans with WSAD?

To mask the fact that they don't know what a DataBase Control is and how it is going to be deployed?

All in all, is it a choice of IDE?

Not really, WLW is tied to WebLogic Server, and it's almost given for free nowadays. The choice is in the application server, and make you swallow the price tag with nice IDEs, and justify (in the case of BEA) a vendor lock-in.

Why just count first developement time and no maintenance task?

Perhaps to mask the fact that WLW java editor is really poor, and doesn't even include refactoring tasks.

What is really compared eventually?

Developement of a J2EE application with a framework integrated into a lightweight (in functionnalities) Java IDE versus a heavyweight Java IDE without any special framework. What to conclude? Use an integrated framework. Is it a surprise? It should not.