Opinion

The alleged Microsoft .NET and J2EE battle is nothing more than a pseudodispute one that matters little to the spirit of what Web services ultimately tries to accomplish (which is cross-platform program-to-program communications). It all ultimately boils down to the following:

Microsoft is very powerful in the applications development tools marketplace. If competitors allow Microsoft to dominate that market, then competitors end up giving a lot of control over applications development destiny to Microsoft. Ultimately, applications (not hardware characteristics) sell platforms so allowing Microsoft to control how applications should be developed and deployed could be suicidal for competing platform/operating environment makers.

The Microsoft versus J2EE battle is not really about which approach and which development languages are better. It is really about controlling application development environments in order to ensure the long-term viability of particular vendors' systems platforms or systems software/application development environment offerings.

There is, however, one valid aspect to these Microsoft versus Sun articles. Microsoft announced its Visual Studio product (which contains Web services SOAP and other protocols) on February 13, 2002. Sun, on the other hand, has been slower to release its official Web services protocols and registries as part of its Sun ONE offering. Further, IBM offers Web services UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP protocol support as part of its WebSphere application server environment. From an analytical perspective Microsoft and IBM appear to be far more aggressive about getting Web services tools and utilities into the hands of developers than Sun.