Microsoft promises a more heterogeneous approach to application development
LIKE ALCHEMISTS of old, corporate programmers dream of a way to turn leaden programs weighted down with old code into e-business gold.
Microsoft is looking to make some gold of its own with its .NET initiative.
With the .NET Framework and the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), which Microsoft sent to beta this week, the company aims to help developers build .NET services in a variety of programming languages as well as enable existing code in various languages to run on the .NET platform.
Microsoft also recently submitted its new programming language, C#, and the CLI to the European Computer Manufacturers' Association (ECMA) to be standardized.
Promise for making the .NET platform open lies in the CLI and the Common Language Runtime (CLR), analysts said.
Third-party language vendors can build compilers that enable their particular languages to run on the CLR, and if the technology operates as advertised, applications written in languages that support such compilers can tap in to or be available as .NET services.
"Microsoft is certainly positioning this as a counter to Java -- it's a far-from-subtle jab at Java," said Dwight Davis, a vice president at market analysis company Summit Strategies, in Kirkland, Wash.
Microsoft, for its part, maintains that the .NET platform is broader than Java.
"Anybody on any platform in any language can build a service that anybody else on any platform can use," said John Montgomery, lead product manager of the .NET Framework at Microsoft, in Redmond, Wash.
Microsoft touts .NET as OS neutral but maintains that Windows will best leverage the platform.
Component-based development, picking from various sources rather than settling for a single, monolithic program, has been a Holy Grail for developers. Of course, there are downsides to writing in older languages -- many of which are less productive than newer languages.
"Microsoft is not going to say that you can achieve the same level of functionality and productivity in Cobol that you can in C#," Summit Strategies' Davis said.
Some companies are using pilot versions of the CLR to build to .NET.
Orbis Systems, a Chicago-based medical applications vendor that has been using Cobol since the 1980s, began writing Internet applications about three years ago, according to Randy Kriz, the company's president. With Fujitsu's help, Orbis Systems is moving to .NET.
".NET will give us the ability to interact and move on to the next level with our Cobol applications," Kriz said. "It's good for us, obviously. We won't have to be rewriting applications and testing applications and retraining and [dealing with] all the other problems that go on with new software. We can go on with Cobol and still be up-to-date technically."
Kriz continued that clients cannot tell across the Web what programming languages Orbis is using, nor do they care.
"We've converted a number of applications from legacy Cobol and turned them into Internet apps," Kriz said. "Now with integration with .NET, hopefully that will come through."
Not everyone is banking on .NET, however. Tim Oliver, a developer at GE, in Cincinnati, said in a roundtable discussion at Comdex that his company made the shift away from Microsoft's .NET precursor, Component Object Model, in favor of Java.
InfoWorld
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