Microsoft .Net: The alternatives

Microsoft's marketing muscle is such that you would be forgiven for thinking that the company's .Net framework is the only way to do Web services. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

The most commonly thought-of alternative is J2EE, and there are many debates going on within companies as to which to go with. But some experts claim, all too often, the people holding these debates are asking the wrong questions.

"It's not an apples for apples comparison," said David Keene, senior product manager for Oracle 9i Application Server, who gave a talk at this year’s JavaOne conference titled J2EE vs Microsoft .Net. "The architectures are very different. With Microsoft you buy an operating system that contains the application server -- it all comes bundled as a 'black box' that just works. With J2EE you are buying into a 'white box' open architecture -- a standard as opposed to a product."

Keene believes that both .Net and J2EE are past the hype cycle, but what people really need now is help articulating the need to go down one route or the other. Ultimately, he says, the decision should be dictated more by buying cycles than by the technologies.

“The real debate is about whether you go with Microsoft or one of its competitors, such as Sun, IBM, BEA or even Oracle,” said Keene. “The problem with .Net is that when Microsoft releases a patch for the operating system you risk destroying everything you have built when you install it. With a Java stack, the patch cycles for these technologies tend to be much slower.”

Chad Vawter and Ed Roman of The Middleware Company, a firm that conducts enterprise Java training and consulting, might be expected to favour J2EE over .Net, but even they are not necessarily as partisan as you might expect. In a recent white paper authored by the two, and available here on IT Insight, they recommend single vendor solutions for Web services. "One of J2EE's strengths is that it has spawned a wide variety of tools, products, and applications in the marketplace, which provide more functionality in total than any one vendor could ever provide," they write, pointing out that this strength is also a weakness. "J2EE tools are often-times not interoperable, due to imperfections in portability. This limits your ability to mix and match tools without substantial low-level hacking."

With lower-end J2EE implementations, note Vawter and Roman, you need to mix and match to get a complete solution, and this is the trade-off when choosing a less complete package. Larger vendors, such as IBM, Oracle, BEA, and iPlanet, each offer a complete Web services solution.

.Net on the other hand provides a fairly complete solution from a single vendor. “This solution may lack some of the higher end features that J2EE solutions offer, but in general, the complete Web services vision that Microsoft will be providing is equal in scope to that of a larger J2EE vendor.”

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