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The
Platform Wars: Unix/Windows; J2EE/.Net - Here We Go Again!
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Web Services has fueled the fire between two different camps that
have begun waging 'platform wars' to determine who will be the dominate
framework in the new generation of distributed computing. And who
better to wage the war than Sun and Microsoft. It is important to
understand the reasons for this debate as it will impact developers,
IT departments, technology partnerships and vendors that will be
building products to support these different frameworks.
Fundamentally, J2EE (Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition) and .Net
are similar frameworks. Both support the foundation of programming
languages, component models, and virtual machines (run-times). The
difference is platform independence. The advantage of J2EE is that
it offers a single programming language capable of running on multiple
platforms whereas .Net offers multiple programming languages (C#,J#,
VisualBasic.Net) but runs on a single platform - Windows.
.Net seems to have an early lead in Web Services since it executes
XML messages through HTTP and has incorporated SOAP into its framework.
However, enterprise IT departments tend to be more Java-centric
given their need for highly scalable and robust infrastructures.
And, after several years in development, J2EE is finally a mature
and reliable platform and is becoming a de facto standard within
the enterprise. Both .Net and J2EE provide viable solutions, but
companies should select a dominant framework to foster seamless
integration and application integration, and accelerate application
development as a long-term strategic initiative. The two most important
criteria when making a platform decision is (a) the openness of
the standards the framework uses and (b) the number of platforms
the framework can deploy.
This war is definitely being waged on the battlefields of the development
community. A challenge for software vendors is getting new recruits
from the ranks to join the Web Services movement and they are positioning
to create new technology loyalists. Java developers have been working
with J2EE for years so they have a lead in understanding the nuances
of the technology and will unlikely switch to Visual Basic.Net.
In the other camp, the move to Web Services is creating a learning
curve for millions of Microsoft developers to learn C# and/or Visual
Basic.Net.
The industry is debating who will win the war. Based on surveys
of the developer community and IT organizations, it seems likely
the world will continue to remain divided and that both frameworks
will survive and linger. We expect that J2EE will remain the dominant
player in large enterprise environments and .Net will find some
success there but will predominately be used in Microsoft-centric
application environments. This assessment is not based on the technology
but rather the division in the Java and Microsoft camps today among
the user community. The goal of both camps should be to enhance
the ease of communication and interoperability and strive to make
this work easier - but this is a lofty goal that has been the cry
of both Microsoft and Java developers for many years. Most IT departments
currently run multiple environments and we expect that they will
continue to do so. We expect that ultimately, the framework decision
will be shaped by the nature of an organization's current environment
and resources, and not on technical merit alone. The good news:
competing technologies keep companies innovating and provide users
with a variety of products and services to choose from.
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Barbara Angius Saxby (barbara@accelentmarketing.com)
founded Accelent (www.accelentmarketing.com)
to help software startups accelerate marketing strategies, planning,
and execution. She specializes in positioning and launching enterprise
infrastructure and application companies. Barbara is a senior marketing
executive with over 20 years experience in strategic marketing management
and has done extensive work internationally.
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