I now officially have Websphere Studio Application Developer running on my laptop. The session that I attended at Lotusphere that explained some of the install issues made it sound like this was a monumental task. It wasn’t. It installed very easily, albeit a bit slow since you have to download binary files, compile them into install images, and then finally install the files.

On the surface, the IDE looks every bit as nice as Visual Studio .NET. Of course, I’m a Java neophyte, so “it looks pretty” probably isn’t the greatest product endorsement.

Hopefully, I’ll have enough time in the near future to put these technologies through the wringer so I can make well informed judgments on exactly where I stand between Microsoft and IBM technologies.