Father Of Java Takes Swipes At Microsoft's .Net

"J2EE has it all over .Net," said James Gosling, a Sun vice president and fellow credited with creating the Java technology. "It's more feature-complete, more mature, and what .Net has going for it is a marketing budget only God can dream of. .Net is a product from a company. J2EE is a market."

At a roundtable discussion at the conference Wednesday, Gosling said Microsoft's marketing engine has established it as a Web services leader but claimed that Sun's J2EE environment is more secure and reliable than Visual Studio.Net.

"The thing Microsoft has going for it is easy tools, an unbelievable marketing budget and a desktop monopoly to exploit," said a salt-and-pepper bearded, bespectacled Gosling, donned in faded jeans and a Java T-shirt. "There is a level of sophistication required [in Java development that makes it daunting for entry-level developers . . . but the security in Java is very strong."

While acknowledging that Microsoft's Visual Studio.Net is an easier environment in which to program, and will become more full-featured over time, Gosling said the Common Language Run-Time (CLR) has fatal flaws, including a problematic memory model and unsafe access facility, that will have implications for the security and reliability of .Net applications.

"It is the bullet through the heart of [Microsoft's CLR story," Gosling said about the alleged memory problems in Microsoft's CLR engine.

He also said the forthcoming support for XML in J2EE 1.4 is robust, adding that published reports that J2EE's support for XML is weak are erroneous and based on J2EE 1.3 implementations on the Java 1.4 SDK. The forthcoming J2EE 1.4, expected to be finalized in early 2003, "is a very complete [set of XML APIs," he said.

When asked by CRN if the long-running war between Sun and Microsoft will taint Web services interoperability, the technologist would not offer any guarantees. Application interoperability is one of the chief benefits of the XML Web services architecture.

"My expectation is .Net will be completely capable of talking to J2EE. But it's hard to tell because there's not a lot of data," he said, later noting that standardized XML schemas will enable connectivity. "Microsoft is playing a funny game right now. They've made a pretty public commitment to standards . . . and interoperability issues should be small. Microsoft hates interoperability at a very deep, deep level, so it's hard to know how it will play out."

Following the roundtable, Gosling delivered a keynote on the future of end-to-end distributed systems. As part of that, he told hundred of programmers to design with the total network in mind,and with a business sense.

"The killer architecture spans across infrastructure components all the way out to the edge of the network, so developers need to think globally and act locally," Gosling said, adding that programmers need to also pay attention to corporate business plans. "The lesson of the dot-com bust is that the little piece of paper called a business plan actually matters and the columns of numbers have to add up to something more than zero."