.Net needs Corba for J2EE interoperation

Enterprises will use both J2EE and Microsoft .Net in the future but .Net needs to offer Common Object Request Broker Architecture (Corba), as web services is not sufficient for systems interoperation.

That was the general view at a round table on J2EE and .Net hosted by Borland at its annual BorCon conference in London this week.

"Web services is a wonderful thing but it's over-hyped," said John O'Hara, equities chief architect and vice president at JPMorgan Chase Bank. "It can make any system A talk to any system B, but it is not equivalent to Corba."

He said web services did not fit with the [Microsoft] client-server architecture ,while XML did not have the processing power for some applications and could not handle tight integration between systems.

Several delegates called for Microsoft to support the Corba application programming interfaces (APIs), as this was a mature standard that enabled tight integration across operating platforms.

But Neil Hutson, Microsoft EMEA chief architect for .Net, said it was probably too political for Microsoft itself to offer the Corba APIs, so an opportunity existed for an independent software vendor to provide this capability.

"Quite obviously there are benefits in adopting a strategy based on open standards and vendors who allow them. [Microsoft] now has an open framework," said Hutson.

He acknowledged a performance problem with what he called "very chatty payloads" using XML web services, and pointed to the Direct Internet Message Encapsulation (DIME) initiative lodged with the Internet Engineering Task Force standards body for addressing this.

DIME is a lightweight binary message format for efficiently encapsulating application messages. But development is currently at an early stage.

"From a vendor standpoint, new platforms offer new opportunities," said David Intersimone, vice president of developer relations at Borland, which provides development environments for both .Net and J2EE. "But there is something to be said for proven technologies."

Delegates were also in agreement on the need to drive costs down, and that open interoperability and standards lessened the need for redevelopment.

"No-one buys anything that doesn't have the whiff of a standard. IBM, BEA and Sun slogging it out [for J2EE] is good for costs, and even saying the 'L- [Linux] word' lowers prices," said O'Hare.

But Rob Wills, technical architect at Severn Trent Water, said Microsoft .Net was the current fad, so new software had to be available on .Net.

"It is a tick in the box, and Microsoft has a legacy of driving people to change their views which will bring .Net more mainstream," he said.