EJB J2EE and XML Web Services Expertise J2EE vs Microsoft NET A comparison of building XML based web services By Chad Vawter and Ed Roman June 2001 Prepared for Sun Microsystems Inc J2EE vs Microsoft NET 2001 The Middleware Company http www middleware company com Page 1 Table of Contents I Preface 3 II Introduction 3 Building web services with technologies that have gained the most acceptance 4 The J2EE and Microsoft NET approach to Web Services 5 III J2EE 5 Java The foundation for J2EE 6 J2EE and Web Services 6 Reference Implementation 8 Additional Services 8 IV Microsoft s NET Platform 8 The NET Framework 10 NET Servers 10 Other NET Products and Services 10 Understanding J2EE and NET by analogy 11 V Comparative Analysis 12 Time to Market Features 12 Single Vendor Solution 13 Support for Existing Systems 13 Market Perception 14 Maturity of Platform 14 Language Support 15 Migration from Previous Platform 16 Portability 17 Web Services Support 19 Tools 20 Shared Context 20 System Cost 21 Performance 22 Scalability 23 VI Conclusions 23 J2EE vs Microsoft NET 2001 The Middleware Company http www middleware company com Page 2 I Preface In this whitepaper we will make a powerful comparison between the two choices that businesses have for building XML based web services the Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition J2EE 1 built by Sun Microsystems and other industry players and Microsoft NET2 built by Microsoft Corporation Some of the statements we make will offend you and hopefully more of them will agree with you So as you read this paper please remember our three promises 1 We promise to compare these choices at a logical neutral and unbiased level 2 We promise to tell the tale about how we really do feel about these technologies 3 We promise to dispel the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt FUD that exists in the marketplace today Although both J2EE and NET cover a great deal of technologies and standards we will focus specifically on building server side systems as web services using these architectures for example we will not be mentioning Jini or Office XP After reading this white paper you will have a solid understanding of how these architectures compare and be empowered to make intelligent decisions in new web services initiatives The first half of this whitepaper is background information about web services J2EE and NET If you already understand these technologies feel free to skip ahead to the 2nd half of the paper which is the juicy comparison II Introduction The next generation of distributed computing has arrived Over the past few years XML has enabled heterogeneous computing environments to share information over the World Wide Web It now offers a simplified means by which to share process as well From a technical perspective the advent of web services is not a revolution in distributed computing It is instead a natural evolution of XML application from structured representation of information to structured representation of inter application messaging The revolution is in the opportunities this evolution affords Businesses have been offering products and services on the World Wide Web for the past few years Have they not then been offering web services In what way are web services actually new In an article entitled The Web Services R evolution Applying Web Services to Applications Graham Glass the CEO and Chief Architect of The Mind Electric defines a web service as A collection of functions that are packaged as a single entity and published to the network for use by other programs Web services are building blocks for creating open distributed systems and allow companies and individuals to quickly and cheaply make their digital assets available worldwide 3 1 The J2EE homepage http java sun com j2ee 2 The Microsoft NET homepage http www microsoft com net 3 http www 106 ibm com developerworks webservices library ws peer1 html dwzone ws J2EE vs Microsoft NET 2001 The Middleware Company http www middleware company com Page 3 Prior to the advent of web services enterprise application integration was very difficult due to differences in programming languages and middleware used within organizations The chances of any two business systems using the same programming language and the same middleware was slim to none since there has not been a de facto winner These component wars spelled headaches for integration efforts and resulted in a plethora of custom adapters one off integrations and integration middlemen In short interoperability was cumbersome and painful With web services any application can be integrated so long as it is Internet enabled The foundation of web services is XML messaging over standard web protocols such as HTTP This is a very lightweight communication mechanism that any programming language middleware or platform can participate in easing interoperability greatly These industry standards enjoy widespread industry acceptance making them very low risk technologies for corporations to adopt With web services you can integrate two businesses departments or applications quickly and cost effectively The vision for web services predicts that services will register themselves in public or private business registries Those web services will fully describe themselves including interface structure business requirements business processes and terms and conditions for use Consumers of those services read these descriptions to understand the abilities of those web services Web services will be smart in that once a service has been invoked it will spontaneously invoke other services to accomplish the task and to give users a completely personal customized experience In order for these services to dynamically interact they need to share information about the user s identity or context information That context information should only need to be typed in once and then made available at the user s discretion to selected web services Building web services with technologies that have gained the most acceptance Now that we ve seen the general philosophy behind web services let s look at how to build and use a web service Web services are in reality simply XML based interfaces to business application and system services and are really old technologies wearing a new hat The following technologies that have gained the most industry acceptance and is one possible way to perform web services A provider creates assembles and deploys a web service using the programming language middleware and