The reality isn't quite so straightforward. For many people, the issue isn't one of Java versus .NET. These are, to them, just the base languages, and it's the business frameworks built on top of them
The reality isn't quite so straightforward. For many people, the issue isn't one of Java versus .NET. These are, to them, just the base languages, and it's the business frameworks built on top of them that matter. I recently visited one such framework development house called RemoteApps in London (www.remoteapps.com).The company has written a huge framework for building grown-up applications and this sits on top of J2EE (Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition). In essence, RemoteApps provides you with all the functionality necessary to implement big applications in a rapid fashion. You can build an application very quickly using RemoteApps' pre-cooked code, or you can dive straight into the framework and do something deep.With the framework, the value is in the reusability and extensibility. If you're building a suite of applications, which is typical of an intranet or extranet site, then you find yourself reinventing the wheel all the time. Since it's all built into RemoteApps, adding in functionality is an almost point-and-click affair.
RemoteApps is excellent, but it isn't the only player in town.There are other large-scale frameworks from vendors such as Vignette V5, BroadVision,ATG Dynamo, and IBM's San Francisco e-business framework. All work in different ways
and none of them is cheap.
Compare and contrast this to the .NET situation and you'll find no RemoteApps equivalent nor will there be for some time.This is the problem Microsoft faces with the newness of the .NET platform.
ENTER HAILSTORM
Instead of going after the large-scale corporate development platforms Microsoft is instead targeting the mass marketplace with HailStorm. This is going to be a suite of capabilities initially aimed at the end user, but with corporate facilities too.The basic idea is that it's too hard for users to get to information where ever they are.
HailStorm is a set of XML- and .NET-based services that manage this for you, out there in the Internet space. It's built on an open-access model, on XML Web Services, which require no Microsoft code to access them, or so the claim goes.
To make this work requires some fundamental plumbing; for example, it's imperative to have authenticated users.This is provided by the Microsoft Passport system as a basic user credential service. HailStorm defines identity, security and data models that are common across all the services, including those that third parties develop for the framework.The claims are mind-boggling.
So how does this fit in with .NET? Well, it's clear Microsoft wants third-party developers to build into the HailStorm world. I expect we'll see a storm of 'mySomethings' appearing over time. In addition, because it's provided a framework for large-scale interoperability between existing information stores,
it makes it possible to glue together the major repositories of information and content in a new way.
This is a huge promise and a real 'bet the company' push by Microsoft. It believes that this all-encompassing framework will be compelling enough that users will want to subscribe to it, and that the end users will get enough value, flexibility and capability from it that it becomes a de facto standard. This then drives the adoption of the .NET development framework and toolset, because companies, developers and so forth will want to be able to provide capability into that framework, and the .NET platform is the ideal method by which this can work.