Java, .Net keep developers creating
Those expecting a holy war this year between Microsoft Corp.'s .Net tools, Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Java and various open source alternatives will have been disappointed, but it's heartening to see that most of the development options appear to be thriving.
Most developers spoken to by Computerworld this year seemed pleased with their choice of tools -- IDEs, frameworks and languages -- though they often ran down the competition at the same time. Developers are usually religious in their choice of environment, though there's clearly more than one path to development nirvana.
When we last asked IT recruiters which skills were in demand, we found Wellington employers tended to favor Java mavens and Aucklanders were seeking .Net gurus.
Microsoft says this year's Tech Ed conference in Auckland in August drew 1,250 developers, twice as many as last year. Cliff Reeves, the general manager of Microsoft's platform strategy group who gave the opening keynote, was keen to let people know that the development future looks bright. Sessions on .Net tools and integrating older systems into new applications were particularly well-attended.
The company created an entirely new platform when it released Office 2003 in October, with greatly improved XML support. Features such as Smart Documents, XML data binding and XSL style support allowed developers to create new Office applications. Microsoft hopes a market will emerge similar to the developer community around the Access database.
C# appears to be popular among .Net developers, who had a choice of several languages including VB.Net, C++ for .Net and J#, a Java-like language. Microsoft also previewed C# 2.0, which is expected early next year.
At the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles in October Microsoft introduced developers to the underlying technologies of Longhorn, the next version of Windows. Although Longhorn is not expected until about 2006, there was plenty for developers to digest. Longhorn's three core developer technologies are Avalon, a vector-based rendering engine; Indigo, a communications architecture incorporating improved Web services support; and WinFS, the indexed file service based on SQL Server. Conference-goers were enthusiastic.
Meantime, Eclipse, an open source IDE, garnered some serious attention. Version 2.1 was released in April with beefed-up Java support, followed by preview releases of version 3.0 later in the year. Eclipse was originally developed by IBM but garnered support from other companies such as Borland, SAP, Sybase, Oracle, Ericsson and Intel. The project's very name may have goaded Sun, which considered joining the consortium before eventually deciding in December to continue supporting its own NetBeans tools.
Sun also found itself in competition with another open source project, the JBoss application server. Sun wouldn't certify JBoss as J2EE-compliant until the JBoss Group ponied up the money to pay for certification, leading to an impasse until November when the Sun and JBoss announced they had reached an agreement to license Sun's compatibility kit.
Meanwhile, a number of developers split away from the JBoss project and announced their own J2EE app server project called Geronimo, to be released under the Apache license and submitted for certification by Sun. The JBoss group promptly questioned
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