Sun, Microsoft officials face off in Java vs. .Net debate

InfoWorld - Officials from Microsoft Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. debated the merits of their companies' respective Web services development platforms Wednesday, with a Microsoft executive taking a more combative stance than his Sun counterpart in pitting .Net against Java.

Speaking at the OMG Integrate 2003 conference in Burlingame, Calif., Dave Wright, a San Francisco-based Microsoft .Net Solutions architect and a former Java programmer, said Java is a "wonderful language" but has limitations in virtual machine and language constructs.

Microsoft's Web services plan relies on the company's Common Language Runtime (CLR) to serve as a virtual machine, he said. Java, Wright explained, is not good for purposes such as development of real-time applications, graphics programs and Perl development.

Microsoft's .Net, he said, presents a distributed architecture as well as a language-independent component model running the CLR virtual machine. .Net is Microsoft's way of re-engineering its entire product line around a new set of framework class libraries and is based on XML Web Services for interoperability, said Wright.

But he conceded that Microsoft is not pursuing the goal of platform independence that Sun is pursuing with Java and is instead relying on powerful class libraries for programming.

Wright acknowledged, "If your target isn't Windows, you can't really implement on .Net today. That may change in the future."

In an interview following the session, Wright said he was referring to a version of CLR that runs on the FreeBSD operating system for use by educators. He touted .Net's support of multiple programming languages.

"You can program in RPG, Cobol, Python. There are many, many different languages that are already supported," he said. "I can inherit a Cobol object, if you can call it that, from a C++ object," Wright added.

He also criticized Java Message Service. "You would think SOAP messages would be folded under JMS, but it's not," Wright said, adding, ".Net has an advantage over Java today in terms of cost and performance." .Net supports 26 different languages, he said.

Sun's Glen Martin, Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) strategist for Java and Web Services Platform Marketing, followed Wright's presentation with a more subdued explanation of Sun's J2EE Web services efforts.

Web services, he said, presents an example of a services-oriented architecture, in which integration of legacy applications is critical.

The Java platform requires compatability with the Java specification, he explained. "The license for J2EE says, if you're not compatible with the standard, you can't ship," Martin said, adding that Microsoft's C++ requires programming to manage transactions and the operating system.

"In short,