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Web Services Making Software Coexist?

Posted by Hemos on from the get-together-right-now dept.

jgeelan writes "Despite the competitive uproar, coexistence of J2EE and .NET will be the norm and most sophisticated IT organizations will deploy on both development platforms. Who says so? No less an authority than the CTO of J2EE powerhouse BEA Systems, Scott Dietzen, writing in this month's Web Services Journal. Dietzen acknowledges that an ongoing conflict is in progress between Java and C# and between J2EE and the .NET server family and is refeshingly honest, admitting that "there is some truth to the 'write once, test everywhere' complaint against Java." His overall conclusion: ".NET is finding a sweet spot for programmed user interfaces, while J2EE continues to enjoy its sweet spot for server-side applications." Unusual honesty by someone so highly placed. Isn't this just what the software industry needs more of, in these increasingly interoperable times?"

4 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Honesty or idiocy? by wadetemp · · Score: 3, Informative

    How well does a .NET UI run on a Solaris workstation?

    Actually you answered your own question. It runs fine, if its an ASP.NET UI. Working on HTML/JavaScript based UI is nearly the same process as developing a client side UI in .NET, given the event-based programming model and similar UI classes for both. Granted, you can't yet run a pure Windows.Forms application on Solaris, but you didn't ask "how well does a .NET Windows Forms UI run on a Solaris workstation," did you? :)

  2. Re:Honesty or idiocy? by RevAaron · · Score: 5, Informative

    I don't know about for Java, but VisualWorks Smalltalk (there's a free, non-commercial version for download for Mac OS, Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, many other Unices) that does something like this. Using one single UI builder, you construct a GUI for the traditional GUI application. From the same spec it generates, a web application and interface. You define callbacks and such just like you would for a regular app, and VisualWave (the web app toolkit) takes care of the rest of it.

    VisualWorks has had this ability for quite a while, at least 4 years or so, which was the first time I played with it. I don't doubt that there may have been something before it that did the same thing, but it preceeds .NET and probably even a similar Java tool.

    --

    Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
  3. Re:BEA is a joke by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative
    I don't know which eclipse you're talking about, but if it's the same one at eclipse.org, the site states teh following:

    The Eclipse Project is an open source software development project dedicated to providing a robust, full-featured, commercial-quality, industry platform for the development of highly integrated tools. It is composed of three subprojects, Platform, JDT - Java development tools, and PDE - Plug-in development environment. The success of the Eclipse Platform depends on how well it enables a wide range of tool builders to build best of breed integrated tools. But the real vision of eclipse as an industry platform is only realized if these tools from different tool builders can be combined together by users to suit their unique requirements, in ways that the tool builders never even imagined. The mission of the Eclipse Project is to adapt and evolve the Eclipse Platform and associated tools to meet the needs of the tool building community and its users, so that the vision of eclipse as an industry platform is realized

    Eclipse is not an app server. It's a development environment with lots of pluggable features. I'm no expert on eclipse, but eclipse uses a different model for GUI development. Rather than use swing, which prefers to have a consistent cross platform look, eclipse wrote their own native libraries and wrapped java around it. This way you get very nice GUI with more low level control. for example, things like fonts and panes are handled differently and require memory management. If you create a particular gui widget, you have to free it up once your done.

  4. Re:Honesty or idiocy? by m3573 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Smalltalk has been phased out by IBM, and the widget elemnts etc are old.

    Squeak is being developed and it's open source: it looks like a toy but its approach to user interaction using "morphs" is interesting.

    Cincom (its smalltalk site slashdotted? :) ) is developing version 7 of visualworks smalltalk, and it will surely be out before i finish checking out all the features of version 5 :)

    The widgets are a little dated indeed, but being a very modular system there may be GUI enhancements to download, try looking around.

    I'm impressed with some smalltalk environment features, like being able to modify some code (which gets dynamically recompiled, no "build" command) and having the changes reflected on the application while it is running, being able to inspect and extend system classes (smalltalk applications merely extend the system, in fact), being able to save and restore all classes and variables i'm working with in a single image file or in distinct packages.

    I'd like to know if there is a java environment with similar features.