<<In the late 1990s, Microsoft executives bashed the Java platform at
every opportunity, but now SOA and Web services has changed that
hostility to benign neglect, said Greg DeMichellie, an analyst with
Directions on Microsoft.
"Their 'war with Java' is over," he said.
So it was perhaps not surprising that in the midst of the controversy
over the viability of the Java EE platform, Prashant Sridharan, group
product manger of Visual Studio at Microsoft, said, "I don't like to
comment on competitors directly. I like to take the high road."
DeMichellie said this is a good public relations strategy, following
the old political advice to stay out of the way when your opponent
appears to be on a self-destructive path.
Sridharan said he has read articles about the Burton Group report that
argues that the Java EE platform is dying of its own complexity, but
has not yet gotten his hands on the actual document titled "JEE5: The
Beginning of the End of Java EE."
But the Visual Studio product manager was enthusiastic when told the
author, Richard Monson-Haefel, senior analyst at Burton, wrote some
nice things about Microsoft .NET as an alternative to the Java platform.
The Burton analyst said: "Microsoft's .NET offers a solution that is
as comprehensive as Java EE, but much easier to develop. The threat of
.NET is largely enabled by JEE5's failure to address the complexity of
its common programming model. In contrast, .NET is generally regarded
as an easier environment to develop applications in, but it is not
narrowly scoped, as is the case with the rebel frameworks, LAMP and
[Ruby on Rails]. Instead, the .NET platform can be thought of as a
direct competitor to Java EE that offers the same level of functionality."
This is music to Sridharan's ears and validates what he said was the
investment and work Microsoft have put into building .NET as a
framework for Web services and SOA.
"From its inception in 2000," the Microsoft product manager said,
".NET was always built on a substrate of Web services and industry
standard technologies such as SOAP and XML. From the onset, I think we
understood the importance of service-oriented architecture and the
importance of Web services, and building out a better communications
framework than typically existed for Windows applications in the past
with COM and things of that nature."
DeMichellie, said it may be a bit of an exaggeration to say the
Microsoft was focused on SOA with .NET from the beginning, but he said
the company's ability to start work on .NET from scratch just as Web
services technology was emerging gives it a leg up of the Java
platform, which dates back to initial work at Sun Microsystems Inc. in
the client/server era of the mid-1990s.
"Microsoft got to erase the board and start over in 2000," he said,
"and that's a little more recent than Java."
The failure of Sun and the other vendors who contribute to the Java
platform through the Java Community Process to "erase the board" as
SOA replaced older models is what allowed Microsoft to gain an edge on
its old rival, DeMichelle argues. He also credits IBM, even though its
WebSphere is based on J2EE, with having the foresight to start from
scratch with a focus on Web services and SOA.
"IBM and Microsoft designed whole new systems around Web services, and
Sun took the same Java that they've been using for other technologies
and tried to extend it to Web services."
Analysts may debate who SOA architects and developers will turn to if
Java EE goes away, but considering that IBM is the founder and major
sponsor of the Eclipse Foundation, which is now touting itself as a
platform, DeMichelle's conclusion is not that far from Monson-Haefel,
who said, "It's going to come down to Microsoft Visual Studio and
Eclipse, as the two dominant players."
IBM and other major vendors such as Oracle Corp., which is still in
the Java EE camp, argue that the Microsoft platform is not ready for
the high volume transaction applications of large enterprise
customers, such as investment firms and banks.
That is the one argument that brings Sridhara at Microsoft back into
the competitive fray.
"In the history of Microsoft, our competitors have always tried to
position us as only good for departmental or small applications," he
argued. "I don't think that is a case that exists any more. If you do
an analysis of any application on .NET Framework 2.0 running on
Windows Server 2003 in a comparable environment versus any J2EE,
you'll see that our Web services platform is faster than any other Web
services vendor. It's also capable of handling more transactions and
larger scale applications than pretty much any other Web services
platform vendor."
DeMichelle agreed that this anti-Microsoft argument is not valid. He
said whatever advantage IBM and Oracle might have in the large
enterprise application market has nothing to do with their use of the
Java EE platform. Oracle's advantage, he said, is the power of its
database technology and IBM has the tradition of serving large
enterprises that dates back to mainframes running COBOL applications.
Yet one potential obstacle for Microsoft emerging as the SOA platform
of choice is whether the Redmond team's products will play well with
others.
Microsoft's Sridhana said his company has invested time and money to
ensure that the .NET platform can interact with other technologies.
"We've developed patterns and practices as well as process guidance
and methodologies to help people learn best practices in a variety of
environments whether they are operating in a legacy environment with
mainframes or with other platforms such as J2EE," he said.
Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, is right
there with Burton's Monson-Haefel, in crediting Microsoft with
creating tools that make Web services development easy, but in a
recent blog on the Java EE viability controversy, Gardner labeled
Microsoft's version "pseudo SOA."
More on .NET, Java and SOA
Asked to explain what he means, he said, "Increasingly, the best hedge
that Microsoft has to keeping more developers within its stack is
simplicity, but simplicity in the Microsoft methodology does not mean
simplicity for general heterogeneity. That's why I call it pseudo SOA.
It's SOA within Microsoft, with Web services and enterprise
integration off-ramps. SOA's great promise is to be both relatively
simple and generally heterogeneous, neither entirely grounded in .NET
or JEE."
DeMichellie didn't accept the pseudo SOA designation, but does agree
that Microsoft's ubiquitous Windows operating system is somewhat
problematic.
"The biggest argument against the Microsoft approach is that it only
runs on the Microsoft operating system," he said. "If you are an
organization and you don't want to rely on the Microsoft Windows
operating system for your key infrastructure, say you really want to
be on Linux, obviously you're not going to use the .NET Framework.">>
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Gervas
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