Telstra’s decision to standardise on Sun Microsystems-backed J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) technology for its future application development surprised Australia’s IT community.
For Telstra, Microsoft’s largest private-sector Australian customer, to pick J2EE over Microsoft’s own .NET architecture sent shock waves all the way to Redmond. Microsoft president Steve Ballmer wasted no time coming to Melbourne, and his smiling embrace upon emerging from discussions with Telstra suggested that the relationship was back on track.
That such a seemingly small announcement could cause such a large stink reveals just how serious the stakes have become in the brewing battle for control of the enterprise.
In one corner is Microsoft, which has made it clear that its .NET strategy—announced nearly two years ago in a fanfare of enthusiasm that’s set to explode with the frequently-delayed launch of Windows Server 2003 (previously named Windows .NET Server) now due in April—is the company’s latest bet-the-farm attempt to build an extensible, distributed and standards-compliant framework for Web applications.
In the other corner is Sun Microsystems, perennial Microsoft critic and developer of the Java family of technologies—including nearly two-year-old Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)—which has years of experience in providing tools to the world’s developer community.
Both are promoting their own visions of the future of enterprise computing. But as the dust settles and product begins shipping, it’s becoming clear that maybe they’re not so different after all.
War of words
It’s one of those rare situations where Microsoft is David, not Goliath; .NET is a displacement ploy targeted squarely against Java and J2EE, which has gained significant momentum amongst customers since its debut. As in J2EE, .NET applications go through a number of stages between source code and application. These stages are designed to liberate the source code from dependencies on the underlying software platform, although in .NET’s case there are many operating system hooks available when necessary.
In time-honoured tradition, the pitting of Microsoft against Sun has led to a war of words between executives, who trade barbs over keynotes waxing lyrical about the future of enterprise computing. “J2EE . . . is more feature-complete, more mature, and what .NET has going for it is a marketing budget only God can dream of,” Sun vice president and Java creator James Gosling told the crowd at a November developers’ conference in the US.
Gosling also took the opportunity to attack the technical design of Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime (CLR) compiler, an analogue to the Java Virtual Machine, that runs applications written in any .NET-compatible language and compiled into MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language)—the conceptual analogue of Java bytecode. Yet in the same speech, Gosling acknowledged the appeal of Microsoft’s Visual Studio.NET development environment—implicit recognition that, in technology terms, the race is well and truly on.
With Microsoft and Sun platforms already moving, however, it’s unlikely to become anything more than a two-horse race any time soon. And in the long term, it could be a competition with no clear winner: Gartner, for one, has projected that .NET and Java will each settle at around 40 percent of the market, with other development platforms making up the remaining 20 percent. Given the J2EE leanings of application server giants IBM, BEA, and Sun, the game has become a familiar one: Microsoft against the rest of the world.
Faced with this challenge in the past, Microsoft has often sought to differentiate its products with proprietary extensions that led the market in new directions but broke established standards. This time, however, Microsoft may find itself constrained by its need to keep .NET interoperable with common Web services-related standards—XML (eXtensible Markup Language) for data representation, SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) for interoperability between services, and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) for cataloguing Web services.
Standards compliance will be crucial to avoid chaos, points out Peter Pritchard, regional director with software giant Compuware, who believes customers will try both environments and “drift towards one or the other. But the one thing everybody needs to keep an eye on is if we see anyone truly trying to break the standard,” he warns. “If someone succeeds, Web services goes out the window and the only thing we’ll be able to use is EDI. And nobody wants that. There’s a lesson there for all of us: you’ve got to try to win this on fairly even turf rather than trying to [jockey for advantage].”
Shouldn't you change 'Microsoft has changed' to 'Microsoft has to change'? A small but great difference, imho...