Can J2EE and .NET Provide Cross-Platform Interoperability?
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Microsoft's .NET Framework and Sun's J2EE technologies are both very popular programming platforms. The two companies have historically been fiercely competitive with each other (though that has been less true over the past few months). Can platforms from these two companies interoperate? Dwight Peltzer addresses this question.
There are many innovative approaches to achieving interoperability between Microsoft's .NET Framework and J2EE technologies. Interop software solutions are broken down into two categories: software development tools, and plug and play tools. I will also discuss other interop technologies from both J2EE and .NET such as Microsoft’s Advanced Remoting technology and Sun Microsystems’s approach with SOAP to Web services.
This article chiefly serves as a brief overview of J2EE and .NET, their architecture and functionality, and then introduces a third party interoperability business solution from JNetDirect Software.
Much has been written about application integration and interoperability between legacy systems and new emerging technologies, and a variety of approaches towards merging the old with the new have been suggested. The rivalry between Java fans and .NET loyalists always causes endless debates around the issue of market dominance and access to platforms in various computing environments. Such discussions invariably lead to the following question: if both Java and Microsoft are committed to providing services for clients, wouldn’t both parties eventually want to share a common goal and conform to a set of standards that would benefit all developers, albeit Java or .NET?
Corporations have invested much time and money in developing legacy systems. It seems logical that eventually.NET will migrate towards the open source community and work towards a much needed consistent set of standards. It comes as no surprise that Sun supported an initiative called the Java Community Process (JCP) for the sole purpose of soliciting suggestions from major corporations to further the improvement of all Java platforms including J2ME, J2SE, and J2EE. This opened the doors to third party vendors by allowing them to contribute further to application and cross-platform interoperability and remote access to objects.
Before we delve into application integration, we will first consider platform-independent solutions from the two major players.
Next: J2EE 1.4 Specification >>
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