Where Are We Going: .net Vs Java?
By James Arendt
What in the world is going on in the marketplace? Technology is
moving so fast that it is sometimes a little difficult to tell
what is happening.
Let’s take a short trip back to the past.
It wasn’t too long ago that applications were designed,
developed, and deployed on a single machine. For those of you
that can remember the early days of the personal computer era,
things like dbase, FoxBASE, and the like might ring a bell.
Everything ran on the same machine -- the user interface, the
business rules, and the database services.
Then along came local area networks, which ushered in the era
of clientserver applications. Now the user interface and the
business rules sat on the PC and sent requests to a
client-server DBMS such as Oracle or SQL Server, while on the
server side, records were processed and results were returned to
the client.
As LANs matured and their reliability improved, application
development went through yet another evolution, namely, the
advent of 3-tier architecture. This transformation resulted in
the user interface, business rules, and data services each
becoming its own independent logical element in the application
architecture. The physical world may have implemented each
element on a separate machine, but that was not required.
The main advantage of the 3-tier model is that business logic
could now be broken up into components, where they could be used
not only in one but many applications. Additionally, changes to
business logic in the server did not require the calling party
or client to change at all. In other words, the details of the
implementation of business logic or the function is not
important, as long as the way it is called and the type of
information that it returns do not change. Let’s face it, the
world is changing quickly and we need to be able to adjust
without having to re-deploy.
Of course, the initial implementation of the 3-tier model
(later to become the n-tier) was primarily on common machines
and operating systems such as Intel, Windows, and Unix. Vendors
each supported their own brand of components. Microsoft
supported COM, followed by DCOM. IBM promoted CORBA, and Sun
touted RMI. Each of these middle tier component flavors was
proprietary and did not provide for inter-operability and
communication among disparate pieces. In order for a Microsoft
application to talk with a CORBA component another piece of
software was required for translation. The same was true for
apps trying to communicate with DCOM objects as well.
All of this made it difficult for diverse systems to talk to
one another, creating an increasingly significant problem, as
Internet business-tobusiness applications became the focus. The
web, a relatively recent addition to the overall IT
architecture, has dramatically changed the way we look at
application development and correspondingly the deployment of
associated services.
If you log on to Land’s End, for example, it’s not unlikely
that the underlying application will have to utilize components
developed by a number of other parties such as AMEX, MasterCard,
Visa, UPS, FedEx, along with a host of internal systems to
provide the total consumer shopping experience.
Sun, with it’s Java language, was in the right place at the
right time. Java’s ability to be compiled to byte code and run
on any machine that had a Java Virtual Machine gave it
portability. The fact that it was designed to be totally object
oriented, target web-based applications, and observe security
issues associated with distributed apps gave it tremendous
appeal to corporate clients.
Visual Basic, on the other hand, earned its stripes in the
Windows-based application development world. It’s easy to
develop apps that leveraged the Window’s Operating System, and
as it VB evolved it took on more and more features that made it
increasingly object oriented, capable of creating reusable
COM/DCOM objects, and a viable tool for web-based applications.
Today, Microsoft claims that there are more than 3 million
Visual Basic programmers in the world.
Introduced in 1991, Visual Basic has gone through 6 versions.
Each oneincreased power, features, flexibility, and capability,
leading up to two major programming languages -- Java and Visual
Basic, with each camp feeling that their product is better.
The fact is that language is not truly the key. The winner will
be the framework/platform that enables the design, development,
and deployment of applications and takes advantage of services
or
components distributed throughout the web.
With the pending release of the next version of Visual Studio
(of which VB is a part), Microsoft has decided to radically
change the way that their language suite works. The next version
of Visual Studio will be called Visual Studio.Net or VS.Net, and
the next version of Visual Basic will be titled VB.Net. There
are many new features and capabilities, but in my opinion, there
are two major changes that will move Microsoft to the center
stage.
First, VS.Net will be a common development environment into
which C#,C++, and VB along with about 14 other non-Microsoft
languages will connect. Language will be a matter of preference.
This is largely due to the fact that they will all compile down
to the same level by utilizing a common run-time module. In
addition, they will all share the same class libraries.
What this means is that an application comprised of components
and services can be developed by a team of developers in several
different languages with the assurance that it will all work
together.
If one were to look closely, one could see that the general
architecture that makes Java so popular is that the output of
the compiler is not necessarily tied to the chip set or
operating system. It would not surprise me if Microsoft made the
run-time module, which is similar in nature to the Java Virtual
Machine, available to the standards committees to be ported to
other platforms. If this were to happen, VS.Net and VB.Net could
take a major leap forward in the language race.
The second major event that parallels the introduction of
VS.Net is the advent of SOAP. Remember our previous discussion
concerning different types of components trying to work with
each other? SOAP or Simple Object Access Protocol, is an open
standard based on XML or Extensible Markup Language, that IBM,
Sun, and Microsoft have agreed upon now makes it possible for
components, developed with competing standards, to communicate.
XML is used to describe the underlying elements of a class
including the methods, associated arguments, and return values.
While SOAP on the other hand, describes the interface including
the path to the XML document. This will remove a significant
obstacle to inter-operability in building applications using
distributed web-services.
To summarize, Java and Visual Basic are currently in strong
competition with one another. A recent check with
ComputerJobs.Com shows that jobs requiring Java, Visual Basic,
and C++, the distribution is 55%, 35%, and 10%. With
VS.Net/VB.Net, SOAP, and the freedom to choose language
independent of platform, one can expect this distribution to
shift from Java to non-Java languages. In fact, with VS.Net
hosting almost 20 different programming languages (including a
Java implementation from Rational) and compiling to a common
byte-code level, personal preference will surely rule the day.
About the Author: SetFocus, known for it's Master's Program and
Corporate Training Services, is a unique training organization
that provides the most current and cutting edge technologies in
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Learning Solutions (CPLS)SetFocus is highly regarded in the
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