#6 - Corba was a good idea, but was poorly implemented. It is far too easy to create "proprietary" corba interfaces for services, thereby locking out some clients. In practice, Corba is only marginally better than simply sharing your proprietary protocols and data formats.
XML Web Services fixes that.
Java does currently have various SOAP implementations available to it, which allows Java developers to use XML Web Services just as .NET developers do.
The difference is the easy of use. In .NET, I can take an existing component, and make it a web service with a single line of code. That's simply impossible in Java... at least of yet.
In addition, one has to write all their own SOAP functionality to utilize the web service, and getting that all hashed out takes a relatively substantial amount of time when you add up every point where an XML Web Service could be utilized. It eventually becomes cost prohibitive.
Again, .NET gets past that by doing all the work for you. (You can, of course, do it or modifiy it yourself, if you like.)
The only other Web Services framework out there that comes close to .NET is IBM's WebSphere suite... it's actually quite good. I would say it's about 65% of what .NET is, which isn't bad at all considering that they've had only a fraction of the 2 years Microsoft had to develop .NET.
|