J2EE vs. Microsoft.NET

A comparison of building XML-based web services

By Chad Vawter and Ed Roman
Prepared for Sun Microsystems, Inc.

The J2EE and Microsoft.NET approach to Web Services

If you want to build a usable web services system, there is more than meets the eye. Your web services must be reliable, highly available, fault-tolerant, scalable, and must perform at acceptable levels. These needs are no different than the needs of any other enterprise application.J2EE and .NET are evolutions of existing application server technology used to build such enterprise applications. The earlier versions of these technologies have historically not been used to build web services. Now that web services has arrived, both camps are repositioning their solutions as platforms that you can also use to build web services. The shared vision between both J2EE and .NET is that there is an incredible amount of 'plumbing' that goes into building web services, such as XML interoperability, load-balancing, and transactions. Rather than writing all that plumbing yourself, you can write an application that runs within a container that provides those tricky services for you. This paradigm allows you to specialize in your proficiencies. If you were a financial services firm, for example, you'd have proficiency in financial services, but likely very little proficiency in web services plumbing compared to a specialist such as Sun, IBM, BEA, Oracle, or Microsoft. By purchasing the container off-the-shelf, you won't need to be an expert at plumbing to build a financial services-based web service. Rather you just need to understand their business problem at hand, and leave the web service plumbing to the container.

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