Web Services Making Software Coexist?

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?"

Comments

Honesty or idiocy?

[AJWM]

".NET is finding a sweet spot for programmed user interfaces,"

On a single platform, perhaps. It's true enough that early editions of Java's Swing weren't the swiftest UIs on the block, Swing has to contend with being platform independant. How well does a .NET UI run on a Solaris workstation?

The UI for most server-side applications is probably HTML, anyway, so I'm not sure what his point was. I suspect BEA is just making nice noises toward .NET to gain a foot in the door of MS-only shops, although it is certainly true that at the SOAP level .NET and J2EE could interact.

We'll see how long that lasts when/if .NET market share catches up with J2EE. (Embrace and extend, anyone?)

Re:Honesty or idiocy?

[zacks]

no one here seems to acknowledge macromedia products here, slashdot readers amkes the world seems to be php and mysql based... mysql is not a proper relational database (yet).... just becase something is free doesn't mean it's the best solution... when a developer costs more than one software license per day, the argument looks a little weak..

the real agurment here is how long does it take to develop out of the box a simple or complex application... cold fusion is simple a much faster language, yes it's actually more 4gl than 3gl, but what are u trying to do? pull some data out of the database and display it....

in cf that means 2 tags (opened and closed) and var names and html

<cfquery name="test" datasource="localserver">
select name, email, description
from users
where active = 1
order by name
</cfquery>

<cfoutput query="test">
#name# - #email#
#description#
</cfoutput>

looks quite clean huh?

why not look at at coldfusion mx, a j2ee application server, where the tag based language makes things simple and you can always fall back to java.

The when you want a more complex decent ui than is possible with html, use flash, w3c dom is great but not so prevalent..

and flash makes for a much for reliable user expierence than dhtml

Interoperability's a bitch...

[camusatan]

Probably the biggest complaint that one could have against web services is the difficulty involved in getting separate ones to interoperate.

Imagine you have a web-based e-mail system. And a web-based word-document reader. One written in J2EE and one written in .NET. Click on a word attachment in the e-mail program, any guess as to whether or not it will open in your word-document reader? Answer is nope!

That people are just now figuring out that demanding that all things be written in One True Language to be hosted on One True Platform from One Designated Service Provider is kinda sad - doesn't that sound restrictive?

Of course, my commentary on this issue isn't coming from nowhere - I wrote a service designed to fix the problem, at its core. But just because I'm biased doesn't mean I'm wrong.

Honesty doesn't count for much these days.

[SlashChick]

It's an unfortunate truth that saying something honest will get you much fewer eyeballs. Slashdot even perpetuates this by posting purposely controversial viewpoints. I mean, which is more controversial, "Linux and Windows both have their place" or

"Linux on the desktop is dead! Windows on the server is dead!"

The fact is that the "x and y both have their place" articles, although honest, are much less likely to get published, because media outlets know that less controversial opinions just aren't talked about as much.

This thread will be lucky to receive 200 comments. Had the article submitted been "Java is dying! .Net is taking over!" it probably would have had 800-1000 comments. It's sad, but true.

Having said that, I use PHP. Stop by #php on irc.openprojects.net! </plug> ;)

Re:Since when have .Net/C# proven themselves?

[PyroPunk]

The consulting firm I work at has deployed a Point Of Sale system running on the .Net framework; it's currently running in 4 restaurants. The touchscreen GUI was written in C#, as was the business and data tiers. We use .Net remoting to communicate between the touchscreen and the server. Just started development using the .Net compact framework to let the waiters use Pocket PC devices when taking orders. I've been developing in .Net since June of last year; deployed two intranet sites and an e-commerce site since then. Have been developing in Java since '97. I personally don't consider one better than the other; but then again I'm not out there fighting a religious battle against Microsoft either.

Re:More Python Please!

[RevAaron]

And I'll be building even better applications via a web, telnet, or regular GUI interface at runtime in a much better language, Smalltalk. :)

But yeah, you're very right. There are many options other than .NET and Java. I know there isn't much for Python, but there are a few companies (IBM, Cincom, GemStone) that provide real commercial support for their web app server products.

j2ee and .net stuff

[fedor]

I still don't understand the real advantages of this kind of stuff. Honestly I've tried to understand the whole j2ee stuff, and I still can't. I haven't tried .NET and I will never try it, because all the books about it with titles containing words like 'Enterprise', 'Solution', 'Deploying' and 'Integrated' just make me sick.

Big companies just try to sell something 'good' for software development. The problem is, that they sell it to suits who just believe the marketing crap of sales people. Most of the time there are no technical people involved in these decisions and people like us just have to work with it, because 'it's good', 'scalable', 'integrated', blkahblahblah...

I really hope all this crap is over in a couple of years, and we can just use whatever we want to use and know is good. Getting experienced in using progamming languages and tools is the only way to see if things work. My experience is that in projects where they used stuff like J2EE, SOAP and COM, a lot of people where involved (a lot of suits) and the projects last long....over 2 years for a simple web based application!!! Arrgrhgh!! I've seen a lot of those projects and nobody overthere knew how to query a database using SQL how to use TCP-sockets, or what's the HTTP-protocol all about...They laughed at me because I did not want to use Visual Age for Java and I used javac and vi instead. "In Visual Age I cannot not see on which line parse errors occur" was my answer, when they asked what was better about just using the command line. I had to explain the word 'parser'.....

People on these kind of big projects just had a one week course and some experience with Excel macro's. And who sells those courses....???


I think, it's all corrupt...

fedor

Better Framework

[jimmyCarter]

I hope I'm not starting a flame war, but I've written apps in each language and the framework for .NET is the the Java Class Library given time to mature and improved upon weak spots. Reflection kicks RTTI's ass among other minor, but effective improvements. I'm not trashing Java, I enjoy programming in each language, but C# is what I'm using more and more to build with.