Varad points to this study between development, deployment, and change requests that the MiddleWare Comany did between VS.NET/.NET Framework and IBM WebSphere/J2EE.
I AM bias, I love .NET and pretty much despise everything else but I had the very unfortuanate experience of working with WebSphere and it was the worse time of my life. I would have preferred giving birth to a full grown Andre the Giant and I contemplated suicide every single day until it was over. I was not and am not a WebSpere guru or expert but I knew five minutes after starting the project that it would not be pleasant. I think the WebSphere community knows this because the WS Admin asked me several times to lift my left leg and breathe through my nose because I was keeping the server from working. Twice he was right. As soon as I did what he asked the server started working again. Strange, eh?