Developers often wonder why j2ee certification is important. If it works, it works. But I think there are a lot of companies right now that still have to make a platform choice for future developments. And they want to be able to make this choice for a longer period, and are therefore looking for standards.
For example, many companies that are right now using Oracle Designer and Developer are investigating if they should use a new development platform. It’s not that designer and developer are worse than .net or j2ee, but Oracle has been very unclear about the future of these products. All it’s communication recently has been about java and j2ee, and about the fact that no new development will be done on the old tools.
So companies are starting to look at j2ee and .net. And what do they see when they look at j2ee? Uncertainty. Many different competing, fast moving standards. For example, for the web presentation layer they can use JSP or Oracle’s UIX (user interface xml), velocity, or should they wait untill JSF is available? And for the data layer, should they use DAO, JDO, EJB’s, BC4J, Toplink , or…. How can they make a platform choice for the future if everything keeps moving so fast? If they decide to use the oracle tools, such as uix and bc4j it will be very costly to switch to something else a year from now.
Would you pay a lot of money for an application server and development tools, if you were uncertain if it was the right choice? There’s less risk in choosing a free, certified, open source application server and development tools. When you afterwards decide j2ee is the way to go you can always switch to expensive closed sourced alternatives (would you want to?).