7thGen

The Key Findinds are:

IBM and BEA are currently best positioned for ongoing leadership. IBM is particularly strong in terms of global presence, strategic vision, platform breadth and delivery capabilities. BEA has strength in technology leadership and a strong delivery channel.
Oracle is best positioned as a challenger to both IBM and BEA at the enterprise level. It has gained significant ground on the two leaders during the past 18 months, and META Group expects the gap to close further during the next six to nine months.
Followers in this market should be viewed as niche players. All vendors in this category will remain viable options for well-defined projects or scenarios where these vendors’ specific value proposition or expertise is relevant. The common theme among all followers is a lack of presence and, in most cases, viability concerns.

Here is the Summary:

the NPE behaviour has been adopted since the JSR-201 group came to the concensus that when converting to natural default values, masked errors can potentially be introduced,
I think that by throwing NPE exceptions, masked errors are always introduced since there’s no clear indication of where to perform null checks.

News Link, Mar 16th