TRENDS

May 2, 2003

As competing platforms for enterprise and ASP applications and Web Services, Sun's Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and Microsoft's .NET are often thrown together in a metaphorical boxing ring: J2EE v .NET? The eager crowd watches to see which one is stronger? Which one will K.O. the other?

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"While boxing may well be more exciting than coding (to many people, anyway), it's clear that when looking at J2EE and .NET the pugilist analogy is not really appropriate. That's because neither platform can deliver a punch to K.O. the other." Give us your feedback in the ASPnews Discussion Forum

In many cases, the process of deciding between the two platforms (technically, J2EE is a set of standards, not a platform) is often over before it has even begun, and has nothing to do with the platforms' respective merits, according to Dwight Davis, a vice president at Boston, Mass.-based research house Summit Strategies.

"In the real world, there is actually a lot less competition than many people would have us believe," Davis told ASPnews. "Companies are often predisposed to one platform or the other simply because they have internal expertise in Microsoft or Java. They are not exactly putting out RFIs for the two platforms," he said.

As far as Web services go there is not much to separate the two platforms. Both have adopted the Web standards of UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) for registering a Web service, WSDL (the Web Services Description Language) to define the service and SOAP (the Simple Object Access Protocol) to make the service accessible, and although the two platforms use different techniques to create Web Services, the end results are similar.

For an ASP, independent software vendor (ISV) or even an in-house corporate development team that is looking at both platforms with an open mind, choosing between .NET and J2EE is likely to be a points decision based on the relative attractions of price, speed of development, ease of use for end users, security or a variety of other factors. In the end, some matrix based approach to the decision-making process is likely to be most productive as factors are weighted and balanced against each other. Each company will assign different relative weights to each of the factors it considers relevant, and therefore each platform will have its share of followers.

No Technical Knockout
Two of the most important factors that developers need to weigh in are reliability and — especially important for an ASP — scalability, Davis says. "Microsoft has been trying to establish its credentials as having an OS that is both reliable and scalable, and it's been playing a catch up game with J2EE. Right now, Microsoft is close to Java in terms of reliability and scalability — with one caveat: Unix can get massively parallel, but aside from that the two platforms are technically equivalent in terms of scalability."

Jay Williams, a vice president at Kingwood, Texas-based consultants Concours Group, agrees that scalability is not a key differentiator now, but says that in terms of reliability, Microsoft still has some way to go. "You can build much more robust applications with Java, as long as you have the developer skills," he told ASPnews.

The complexity of the application is also an important consideration, Williams said. "If there's just one data store then .NET is fine, but in a data warehouse type of scenario where you could be accessing numerous databases, then you need a Java back end as Microsoft just doesn't handle cross-platform issues. If you're dealing with Oracle, SAP and so on, then .NET doesn't have the tools."

But an application is only worth considering if it can be developed in a reasonable time period at reasonable cost by reasonably skilled coders. An important way to lower the threshold is by using efficient development tools (and support services), and most observers would agree that in this department Microsoft has the edge with its Visual Studio .NET, the Microsoft Developers' Network (MSDN) and the other tools and support services it offers. What's more, Microsoft's .NET tools are certainly more likely to work together than the smorgasbord of different tools offered by the various J2EE vendors. Even so, Microsoft's lead is not as clear cut as it once was, according to Summit Strategies' Davis. "This is an area in which Sun has been playing catch up with Microsoft. The Java side has made a lot of ground in development tools and developer networks, and as a result Microsoft's lead is not as marked as it was five years ago."

Microsoft, of course, is looking to regain that lead and last week it officially unveiled its Windows Server 2003 operating environment, along with its Visual Studio .NET 2003 developer tool, Microsoft Exchange 2003, and a 64-bit edition of SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition. The company is hoping the products will establish a new standard in enterprise computing — an area where it has traditionally lagged behind the more powerful but proprietary Unix infrastructure.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called Windows Server 2003 platform the cornerstone of Microsoft's Internet-based .NET strategy and key to its entry into Web services and described it as "a breakthrough in terms of what it will mean software developers and customers that want to collaborate and communicate." (See Microsoft Opens Windows Server 2003.)

J2EE's Multiple Personalities
At this point it's worth noting that while .NET is tied to the Windows platform, J2EE-based applications can in theory run on any platform with a Java Runtime Environment, which includes Windows, as well as various mainframe and Unix based platforms. This is useful for ISVs as they may well want their products to run on multiple platforms, but for Web native ASPs this is probably not so significant. The ASP can pick the platform that suits it to develop and deliver its applications.

Many Web-native ASPs will, by definition, deliver their applications over the Web using a browser. In many cases, the delivery method will make .NET a sensible choice for applications (which don't use J2EE middleware). "The browser wars are over, and Internet Explorer has won, so if you are planning on Web delivery through a browser that will dictate what you use," Williams said.

Security is also a prime consideration for any developer, and although Microsoft does not exactly have a faultless reputation for security, Java should not be considered secure either, Williams warns. The reality is that most developers will want to use a third-party security framework, so neither J2EE nor .NET have a significant advantage here.

A Boxing Match With no Winner
While boxing may well be more exciting than coding (to many people, anyway), it's clear that when looking at J2EE and .NET the pugilist analogy is fun but not realistic. That's because neither platform can deliver a punch to K.O. the other. On reliability, and security it's a close call. While J2EE may have the edge on scalability and complexity, .NET counterpunches with the better toolsets and the most common delivery vehicle in Internet Explorer.

As their roughly equal market shares indicate, both J2EE and .NET have their strengths, and in many cases the choice will be made not on the merits of the two platforms, but on the skills of existing staff and the impracticality of acquiring new skills.

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