.NET and J2EE - via John Dowdell
This is a great article by Macromedia staffer Peter O'Kelly (VP of strategy) one of the points he makes is worthing noting.
Microsoft addresses only Microsoft server platforms with .NET, while J2EE products are available on a wide variety of platforms (including Windows). At least one vendor, Ximian, is focused on porting more of .NET to non-Microsoft platforms, but it's by no means clear whether they will be successful (or if Microsoft will allow them to ship anything broader than the parts of .NET standardized by the European Computer Manufacturers Association [ECMA]).
The Ximian effort that Peter mentions is called Mono and is not only building the ECMA parts, that is the CLI, CLR, CTS and a C# compiler but also the full FCL as well as ADO.NET, ASP.NET, a VB.NET compiler and a JScript.NET compiler. In the light of the patents that Microsoft have appiled for its not yet known if the Mono project will be allowed to continue its course, but like IBM while Microsoft has the patents it rarelly enforces them and in my experience has only ever said good things about the project.
Its worth noting that Peter makes no mention of Rotor which is a verson of the Microsoft CLI released under the Microsoft shared source license (therefore its also called the SSCLI) this runs on Windows, FreeBSD and MacOSX, a third party has also ported it to Linux. Rotor is based purely on the ECMA parts of the .NET Framework and therefore does not include ASP.NET etc. Also another project Peter makes no mention of is the DotGNU project which like Mono is creating a cross plaform version of the .NET Framework.
I doubt very much that cross platform will remain J2EE's forte for very long.
12:47:31 PM 
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