I don't mean to sound like your typical Windows basher, but I find it curious that the environments in which I work are so split between UNIX (and the like) on the server and Windows on the desktop.

I'm currently working on a web-based application. The application presents forms to users in a web browser, and deals with them in servlets and applications on a web server. The web server is running on Sun Solaris, but could be any Java-friendly server. (Sun gets my vote anyway...)

The desktop on which I work uses Windows XP as its operating system. I spend the bulk of my day in a 100% Java environment using IBM's version of Eclipse, WSAD. In other environments I have used the straight Eclipse and JBoss on which to develop, but still on Windows.

While I've yet to encounter a problem wherein properly written code won't execute the same on this Windows development environment or the target UNIX server, or even my at-home UNIX-based development environment, it strikes me curious that some of these larger organizations don't run a closer environment on the desktop to what is running in the server room.

I run Eclipse (or NetBeans) and JBoss (or Tomcat) on my Mac, Solaris, LINUX, and Windows desktops in my home office. I run Solaris, LINUX, and Windows servers, too. I only have the one Mac Mini, so no Mac server, although the Apache+Tomcat web server on the Mac does serve pages (as proof-of-concept). I find that each environment performs as can be expected for the system on which it's installed; by that I mean that the 2.4GHz Pentium outperforms the 500MHz Sparc, but is in turn outperformed by the AMD64 3200.

I find that on the same system, dual-booting Windows and LINUX, there's usually better response with LINUX than Windows. I would expect the same with Solaris instead; I haven't yet delved into dual-booting Windows and Solaris on one of the Intel systems (although that is fast approaching--I wanna see how the AMD64 performs with Solaris 64--and again when 64-bit Windows is out). I have downloaded the install ISOs, so we'll see how that goes soon!