• The common theme is that ASP.NET enables all stakeholders to do more in less time, less money, less hassle, less effort.
• ASP.NET delivers high function and high performance, combined with the lowest total lifecycle costs, resulting in the best value to businesses seeking a web application platform.
• In 2002 Microsoft first delivered the .NET Framework as a part of the Windows® platform. ASP.NET is the subset of .NET that delivers an innovative framework to allow software developers to develop feature-rich Web applications and services in less time, without sacrificing performance, scalability and security. ASP.NET functions as a core part of the Microsoft platform.

• Web applications are reaching wider audiences, and are more important to businesses than ever before.
• Using ASP.NET in today’s highly competitive business environment, organizations are able to quickly integrate with new partners, respond to new regulatory requirements, or rapidly react to changing market conditions.
• Using ASP.NET, the expectation of 24×7 up time introduces challenges to administrators who must collect and manage metrics indicating availability and performance trends, and who must perform system and application updates without affecting users.
• Best of all, ASP.NET pages work in all browsers -- including Netscape, Opera, AOL, and Internet Explorer.

• AJAX is a web development technique used for creating interactive web applications.
• The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user requests a change.
• This is intended to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, functionality, and usability.
• Ajax is a cross-platform technique usable on many different operating systems, computer architectures, and Web browsers as it is based on open standards such as JavaScript and XML, together with open source implementations of other required technologies.

• In terms of website performance, which refers to how fast a page can be displayed to a user, .Net has proven to be far superior to Java in real-world applications and in tests conducted by independent analysis firms.
• With respect to lines of code, a similar application can be written in .Net with 15% of the code required for the same application written in Java.
• In general, Java is not used due to cost and time considerations, so the website pages load more slowly and the code is more difficult to maintain.
• In general, .Net brings the power of an enterprise application into the cost range of a small and medium sized business by reducing the lines of code required.
• This reduction in code results in decreased development time, expensive development staff, maintenance and overall cost, while delivering superior website performance.

A team of 2 developers rebuilt the “Sun Microsystems Java Pet Store J2EE Blueprint Application” using .Net in 4 weeks with 25% of the code.  When tested in a lab, the .Net application ran %1000 faster than a tuned version of the Java application.  The same Pet Store application was rebuilt by both Microsoft and Sun for an independent competition sponsored by The Middleware Company.   Below is a comparison of the results:

	.Net 1.1/Windows 2003	J2EE/Windows 2000
Lines of Code	2,096	14,004
Time required for tuning and optimization prior to performance test	2 man-weeks	10 man-weeks
Price/Performance Ratio – the cost per server divided by the maximum transactions per second the server could handle	$316 – in other words, for a Java application to handle the same amount of website traffic as a .Net application, and additional $989 would need to be spent on server hardware.	$1,305
Maximum Pages served per Second	1,400	600
Maximum Number of Concurrent Users	6,000	4,000
Maximum Number of Transactions per Second	117	59

Test Notes: Each application was executed on identical Compaq Proliant servers; J2EE was tested on two Application Servers, one of which crashed midway and did not complete the test; J2EE used an Oracle 9i database while .Net used a SQL Server 2000 database; J2EE ran on Windows 2000 because it outperformed RedHat Linux 7.2 in a trial test.


The Nile Benchmark is a complete end-to-end ecommerce application server benchmark that has been widely used by independent testing laboratories including Doculabs, eWeek, and PC Magazine to benchmark application server products.
The Nile application is a useful benchmark because it is simple and straightforward, yet exercises the common elements found in most real Web applications.  The benchmark shows that the Nile application implemented using Microsoft ASP.NET outperforms the same application implemented using EJBs on a leading J2EE application server by 345% on an 8 CPU system when output caching is enabled for both products. It also shows that the Microsoft.NET version of Nile outperforms the EJB version of Nile on an 8 CPU system by over 421% when output caching is not used.