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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dexter Lives On who wrote (4668)	12/18/2001 9:59:04 PM
From: axial	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 46821

Hi, Rob - "I'm a little surprised they got IBM in on this - the world really fears Microsoft -" Many think that Microsoft has missed it, on the Java question. The .NET strategy, Stinger, and Microsoft's attempt to carve out a divergent path is by no means a sure thing. ..."Will the effect of this be a schism? Will it create an insurmountable barrier to Microsoft and Sun customers, forcing them to choose between Windows and Java development? On each side we will be using tools and technologies that are almost the same, but not quite. If Microsoft falters in the future, this will make it easier for all things UNIX to take over the world. When Microsoft says they have bet their future on .NET, they really mean it! It is fascinating to speculate about possible integration of the Java universe into .NET. This is perfectly possible technically, and rumours currently abound about work being done (possibly by Rational Corporation) in this direction. In the meantime, Microsoft has announced JUMP to .NET. The 'JUMP' stands for 'Java User Migration Path', and the package will include support for writing Java source code in the Visual Studio.NET environment, and a tool for converting Java byte code into MSIL. While Microsoft's recent settlement agreement with Sun prevents them from implementing Java libraries in the .NET environment, it is not clear if other vendors could legally port the Sun libraries. Parallels could be drawn here with the early days of the PC, when third parties got around IBM's zealous protection of the PC BIOS by producing functionally compatible versions that did not breach copyright by duplicating any of IBM's original code. The second issue is that, while Java may provide a poorer platform and environment in a fundamental sense, it does currently have a more extensive set of class libraries than .NET - although not as up-to-date in regard to technologies such as XML. Clearly, Microsoft has put a lot of work into ensuring this shortfall is not too great. However, Java has a lot of people in a lot of different companies working very hard on ever more sophisticated libraries. This, I suspect, will be a major area of competition. Another point that cannot be over-emphasised is that Microsoft is asking developers to take an enormous leap forward in adopting .NET. We only have to consider the inertia in respect of Windows 2000 to see that many companies will be extremely reluctant to become early adopters of this new technology. Indeed, here in Pygmalion, we are faced with a significant challenge during the next few months. All our developers will need to be retrained extensively, not only in the new tools, but also, for some, in the whole approach to writing 'first class' object orientated code. There is one more issue that should be taken into consideration. Sun has suffered severe criticism in recent years because of its reluctance to open Java up to external standardisation, although it has recently amended the Java Community Process to allow greater third-party control." Message 16612481 Regards, Jim (Frank, thread, apologies for this: I think there is some bleed here)