I spend a couple years as a senior consultant for Vignette VPS so I can add a few comments to Rogers. First I think his remarks are probably a fair assessment. Vignette Storyserver worked pretty well but it helped to have a good Oracle DBA and Unix admin as it runs about 4-5 processes integrating all the template management, updating etc. I liked the TCL API and it was well documented with examples so was not difficult to learn. The lack of a ACS stype toolkit was frustrating but they built kits , just you had to pay for them which I thought wasnt necessary given the cost of the main package. I built a couple sites with workflow, content mamagement , personalization etc in about 3 months each with a couple local developers. The main issue is getting the requirements right, making decisions etc rather than the technology. So Vignette works fine if you have at least 1-2 Million to spend and want the security of a company with lots of Fortune 500 accounts. I suspect they will be acquired by IBM or Oracle in the future.. so they will be around.
I don't have experience with the new java based stuff other than my main assessment of all the web app server stuff is that it is more complicated to maintain and java is not a great language for web development.
cheers
Jamie
