.NET 2.0 vs. IBM WebSphere 6.0

http://www.theserverside.net/articles/showarticle.tss?id=NET2BMNovember
The goal of this paper is to present a comparison of Web application servers: the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 running on Windows Server 2003, and the latest release of IBM WebSphere Application Server, version 6.0.2.3. According to a recent IDC study from October of 2005, roughly 78% of mission critical application projects under development worldwide use an application server. In this study, IDC also found that the combination of .NET and Windows Server 2003 is now the most commonly used application server for mission critical applications, exceeding IBM WebSphere usage with 37% usage for .NET/Windows Server vs. 12% usage for IBM WebSphere
This paper presents the results of a new benchmark that compares the performance of those two application servers. The benchmark is based on the PlantsByWebSphere sample application, the primary sample application included with WebSphere 6. For this benchmark, we implemented a functionally equivalent .NET application (DotNetGardens), and also made several performance optimizations to the IBM application code base to ensure a fair comparison of performance for data-driven Web applications.