Microsoft .net and J2EE Technologies

¶ … Microsoft .NET and J2EE Technologies

The intent of this analysis is to compare Microsoft .NET and Java Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application and deployment development environments across six dimensions. These include a comparison of their functionality, reliability, efficiency, usability, portability and maintainability. Both Microsoft .NET and J2EE share comparable functionality in the areas of APIs, services and protocols that allow for rapid development of complex applications. The comparison of these application development environments across these six dimensions also illustrates the pervasive adoption of software quality programming standards as defined by the pervasively adopted standard, ISO/IEC 9126:1991 (Huitfeldt, Middleton, 2001).

Functionality

Comparing the functionality of Microsoft .NET and J2EE needs to begin at the Client Tier and Web Services levels of each of these two platforms. For Microsoft .NET, the client level includes Web Services support technologies specifically designed to allow for integration of legacy, dissimilar systems that do not share a common basis for integration at the data and process level. The Microsoft .NET platform compensates for this by providing support for the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) and Microsoft's own integration and commerce platform, BizTalk. Microsoft's reasoning in making all of these protocols available is that the breadth and depth of integration support at the client level is going to be critically important for making the most of the specific application and Web Service data needs over time (deJong, 2005). Microsoft continues this design objective from a functional standpoint by including Active Service Pages (ASP.NET) supported by .NET Managed Components and Host Integration Server that is also integrated to legacy systems through the SOAP, UDDI and WSDL protocols (deJong, 2005).

J2EE resembles .NET at the client level with support for Web Services technologies including SOAP, UDDI and WSDL in addition to support for ebXML which is used for integration to Web Services smaller components or Servlets (deJong, 2005). This is the major difference at the client level between the two programming frameworks at the client level: J2EE has applets and applications supported with direct integration to Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) server-based platform while .NET relies completely on the ASP.NET Web Services platform. Because of this structural simplicity of .NET, it is much simpler to troubleshoot Web Services applications and create greater levels of complexity in them as a result.

Reliability

Both the Microsoft .NET platform and J2EE have been designed to the quality standards of the ISO/IEC 9126:1991, which sets minimal levels of performance on key software quality metrics. Of the two, the structure of .NET is better able to withstand complex variations in programming requirements and performance due to the more unitary structure of relying on a single server component, ASP.NET (deJong, 2005). J2EE reliability is also enhanced with the depth of support for secondary server and integration components, yet has the added complexity of dealing with versioning compatibilities across the entire platform.

Efficiency

Of the two development platforms, Microsoft's approach to enabling greater programming efficiency is seen in the standardization and validation of quality at the tools level (Miller, 2003). This approach taken by Microsoft to ensure consistency of development tools vs. The widely varying levels of quality for J2EE rapid development platforms is apparent in the scalability and performance of the completed applications. Microsoft's focus on the quality of the programming development tools has given them an advantage in terms of programming efficiency (deJong, 2005).

Usability

A strength of the J2EE development platforms is the pervasiveness of the application tools. The strength of the Microsoft .NET platform is the ability to create a consistent user experience throughout all applications (deJong, 2005). While J2EE has many variations in terms of development tools, Microsoft has by far more consistency to the usability goals and navigational areas of an application and Web Services' development.

Portability

Microsoft's .NET platform is specifically designed to allow any application to move across the Windows platform at the server level and across all client platforms supporting HTTP (Miller, 2003). The portability of J2EE platforms on the other hand is not nearly as easily done, even on a comparable operating system. The lack of consistent programming standards on the J2EE platform leads to many variations in the development of applications at the client level (deJong, 2005). As a result, .NET applications are often more portable across platforms over time.