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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?"
".NET is finding a sweet spot for programmed user interfaces,"
.NET UI run on a Solaris workstation?
.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.
.NET market share catches up with J2EE. (Embrace and extend, anyone?)
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
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
We'll see how long that lasts when/if
-- Alastair
Ugh... I'm sick of these industry horses wearing blinders. There are more than two choices, of course. When .NET and J2EE developers finally get sick of watching their compilers sing and dance, I'll still be here adding new features to my Python applications at run time in a much better language. :)
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.
How many months do you have to have worked with them to be considered old dog on the development team?
18? It's not like it just came out yesterday, the beta has been available for at least a year and a half. Wrox put out books on programming with the beta languages and the beta framework.
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
.Net is taking over!" it probably would have had 800-1000 comments. It's sad, but true.
;)
"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!
Having said that, I use PHP. Stop by #php on irc.openprojects.net! </plug>
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
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.
They view a website as a large monolithic application.
Applications haven't been "monolithic" for a long time. MVC had it's origins in application design, and anything decent these days is designed with the same 3-tier to n-tier approach that a web site would have.
It's all in the economics - you have to be able to update one part of the application without the changes propagating throughout the whole application.
As far as I know, JBoss and Jonas are the free, open-source J2EE appservers competing with BEA. May be you meant one of them.
All your favorite sites in one place!
Possibly. Like I said, I've only started evaluating options. I was pointed at Eclipse, and a quick look at it looked like it might be both an app server and an IDE.
Thanks for the pointers however. More work, more fun. More acclaim when I save us hundreds of thousands of dollars.
-Todd
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
Call me a cynical deconstructionist, but I think it's more important to realize what BEA is trying to do with comments like this.
.Net. Whether or not you you like it versus J2EE, Microsoft has the deep pockets to basically buy a market position for .Net over the next five years. BEA is king of the hill today, in a Java dominated market. As .Net grows, there will be a new niche opening. That might be filled by Microsoft itself, but it will be just as attractive for a more enterprise-oriented new company to fill if BEA doesn't.
Clearly, BEA needs to grow over the next decade, and has to be very careful about the inevitable market power that Microsoft will have with
BEA isn't stupid. It realizes it has to be ready as a potential Microsoft partner, or it risks limiting its dominant position in the application servers and related software market to the Java side of the world. That's why it's being so "honest" about things like this.
(begin list of real-world uses for web services)
(end list)
Table-ized A.I.
I'm afraid I don't follow you. Eclipse is an IDE. Like JBuilder or NetBeans, not an application server. Sure, you could build web applications from scratch or using a more primitive product using Eclipse or any other IDE or editor, but Eclipse doesn't replace Weblogic Server any more than emacs.
Maybe the support people don't follow you either, because you don't have a handle on what you're talking about? Maybe it seems overpriced because you're buying a web app server to do the job of an editor? Perhaps I'm being too harsh, but just some ideas.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
BEA makes money by selling WebLogic, which is an environment for developing server-side apps. He seems to really be saying, "Look, Microsoft, you go mess around with programmed user interfaces, because server-side development is our turf."
Openly defying Microsoft doesn't usually work, but clever companies have managed to stay out of Microsoft's sights by promising to play well with Microsoft and stay in their niche.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
18 months is just about long enough to get the experience needed to shake out the first set of design bugs. I vaguely recall it was about that time frame to go from Java 1.0 to 1.1, which saw some significant improvements. But there were still a few more more signficant changes from 1.1 to 1.2 (aka Java2).
.NET Microsoft has the advantage of learning some lessons that Java pioneered, but it's still a Microsoft 1.0 product. There'll be shakeouts yet.
Granted, with
-- Alastair
Having standard ways to do remote communication is good, but all the bloated hype from all the various camps does a lot of dis-service. As far as I'm concerned, all the big tech companies are guilty of it, so it's not like MS or Sun are worse than others. The real benefit for businesses with technologies like C#, Java, .NET and web services is standard protocols and frameworks. The chances of a company finding skilled replacement when staff leave is more likely than a non-standard proprietary system. For me, the hassle of marketoid gibberish is worth it to move towards more standard and flexible ways of developing software.
Don't kid yourself.
Management views the website, with its browser interface, as little more than a modern face on the old IBM mainframe application with its 3270-terminal interface.
The 3270 was a page-mode text terminal that let the app define fields the user filled in or checked off and then click a 'submit' key to send the form's contents back to the mainframe. Sound familiar?
That the back end now may consist of apps or components spread across several boxes, vs different apps and components in the same big box, isn't that huge a difference. (Just because the apps may have run on the same mainframe doesn't mean the whole thing was monolithic from an application sense.)
-- Alastair
Funnily, it sounds very familiar. Perhaps that's because one of my jobs is to convert TN3270 applications (written in Taskmate) to use apache and mod_perl.
It ain't pretty.
(* The modding up of such stupidity is going to finally drive me away from Slashdot, I think. It's hard to blame the morons who post gibberish at nearly every opportunity, when, with useful moderation.... *)
.NET or JavaBloatX do it *better* than HTTP, SOAP, FTP, ODBC, etc.
.MS are simply trying to out-acronym the other in the hearts and minds of PHB's.
I notice in all your counter-rantings that you never described an *actual* application, and how
There are plenty of existing communication approaches out there. Sun and
In the mean-time, we have open existing K.I.S.S. protocols to get real stuff done without selling out to the battling fat cats and getting shot up in their cross fire.
Let them battle by themselves, we don't need 'em.
Table-ized A.I.
(* You, however, said "web services", and since you're tossing SOAP into it now as if this unrelated to "web services", coupled with your pseudo-rant, I'll assume you're not actually talking about "web services", and are talking about specific frameworks for implementing them. *)
I suppose a definition of "web services" is needed to clearify this discussion.
If web services is "using the web to communicate between 2 or more different machines", then "web services" is actually *redundant*, because that is precisely what the WWW is for, isn't it?
It would be like calling something the "data transfer network" or "transportation vehicle" or "fly-capable airpline" or "floating boat" or "kill-capable military"[1], etc.
[1] Well, I suppose there are some really lame militaries out there.
Table-ized A.I.
Cornering the Autocoding Market
Some info on Autocoding
Do you mean to imply that BEA is scared with good reason, or that they're scared for no good reason? I guess what I really want to know is whether you feel BEA is weak, or J2EE is weak, or both?
I'm not sure that BEA is exposing its jugular, but I definitely agree that playing the "we can all get along" game with MS usually leads to catastrophic meltdown. Only a few software companies can truly say that they've been able to successfully partner with MS without being chomped on hard. But using the McNeally approach isn't always successful either.
It seems that one of the most vexing business challenges of this age is "how do we compete in the same market as Microsoft?"
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
LOL :)
.NET is a framework which IS ready for primetime, because it offers all the functionality needed to build mission critical applications which have to serve thousands of users.
.NET falls short when it comes to delivering what's promised.
.NET software, I know what I'm talking about.
And why's that? WSDL isn't MS proprietry language, it's a standard defined by many companies, and should be used with UDDI, currently in v2.0.
So, f00zbll, show me the beef where
ps: I develop a lot of
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
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
:wq!
How does Microsoft (or anybody else) expect major corporations to run mission-critical stuff over lines provided by ISPs who routinely oversubscribe their boxes and undersubscribe their bandwidth?
I can't reliably get my Usenet newsfeed without "Connection unexpectedly closed by server" messages.
Anybody think you can run General Motors or any bank on that basis? Anybody think any ASP isn't just going to be an ISP with a new acronym?
In a way, until the phone companies get us that infinite bandwidth they were promising a couple years ago, this is good because it will probably kill Microsoft when it becomes apparent that none of this will work for reasons entirely outside the issue of which programming language or object broker is used.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
As someone who doesn't have much of an idea as to why webservices are needed (I've read the articles and looked at some examples) because I often just think that the whole idea of web services is like a minutarised packaged version of the ASP boom and flop a few years ago and that there are definitely other ways to do this. To me it seems as if the programming side is as much a marketing push by IBM,MS and others to generate more business than a real innovation.
To me the idea of webservices seems to be the ability for a client of some kind (could also be a server type of client) to send a stateful request for info to a server of some kind. Since developers have been working around the Browser's lack of state for years and non browser applications can use a myriad of protocols etc to communicate to their server, such as XML-RPC,RMI,CORBA or whatever.
Turning SOAP and UDDI into a universal standard is nice but can anybody tell me why companies trying to sell web services are any different from companies that tried to make a living (and flopped) with the ASP thing a few years back?
I see others have pointed out the IDE (Eclipse) != App Server. The integration can confuse folks, however. IBM is spending big bucks to make Webshphere Studio -- Eclipse with WAS debugger and build integration their main development tool.
Anyhow, I've found that IBM will cost you just as much.... except you get something that is much rougher around the edges. Want EJB 2 support? IBM should be out with their first cut in another month or so. BEA went gold within a month of the spec coming out last November. My benchmarks showed it is not even close to a fair fight with the current v4 or beta5 vs BEA.
Solid EJB containers cost real money. Oracle is getting cheaper -- just starting to work with it. Sun looks like they are giving one away for free, but not sure how solid that one is. JBoss gets pretty high praises from those in developement.
Low cost IDE's for doing EJB work are the bane of Enterprise Java Bean developemnt. You end up spending big bucks 2K+ for an IDE like JBuilder, or you get something that works for only one App server. If JBoss expands the eclipse tool the same way IBM did, it will be a nice kit.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
(* Well...no. But, then again, I've never seen an office suite that couldn't be hand-coded in assembler. *)
I asked about *benefits* already. Show how the MS/SUN approach is also faster, better, cheaper, gets your shirts whiter, etc.
Table-ized A.I.
That is the point. C#, ASP.NET and VS.NET are the perfect combination if you want to make HTML based UIs. You just drag a button onto a webpage, double click and write the event handling code in C#.
That is kind of suspect since real HTML is flow-based and not coordinate-based. Thus, MS is probably breaking a standard or making up a new one, unless I am missing something here. (I suppose you could use style-sheet absolute positioning, but that was buggy on some browsers when I tried.)
(BTW, Remote via-HTTP GUI's are highly possible IMO. Web forms for biz apps don't work very well for non-trivial stuff IMO. There are technology drafts like XWT and SCGUI for remote GUI's. They just need a big-name push.)
Table-ized A.I.
(* There are multiple division candidates for any non-trivial app *)
That should be "multiple orthogonal division candidates".
Unfortunately, modularity is often a dead-end goal IMO. Somethings you can split up into a nice black box off to the side, some things you just can't. Rather than chase a dead-end dream of boxing everyhing, we need to think about creating "virtual modularity". This is where you can create the modularity you need for a *particular* need. Relational technology comes the closest to this IMO.
OO just becomes exponentially complex when it tries these kinds of things because it is pretty much a one-dimensional technology.
OO is wonderful for those items that fit and change along that one dimension/border, but barfs on those that go against its main grain.
Table-ized A.I.