As someone who has spent a lot of time in those "lumbering" organizations, I tend to agree. While it isn't unreasonable to expect professionals to learn multip

As someone who has spent a lot of time in those "lumbering" organizations, I tend to agree. While it isn't unreasonable to expect professionals to learn multiple deployment scenarios, the sad truth is that it can be hard to arrange to have such professionals. Expecting someone who's career has revolved around JBoss/WebLogic/Tomcat/whatever, to come to grips with the vagaries of mongrel clusters is a recipe for failure. Not only does it mean learning something new, something they may regard as a "toy", it is a solution which exists outside of their domain, i.e., a threat. That doesn't mean it can't be done, but it does mean being able to say "it's a war file" is a huge and important lever.