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June 22, 1998

Make The Web Work For You

continued...page 4 of 6

Microsoft Visual InterDev 6.0
Microsoft is going after the Web application development market with gusto. And its tools are good, though they provide little support for development platforms other than Windows NT or 95 (their applications should be able to run on different browser platforms).

Visual InterDev 6.0 is Microsoft's IDE for Web applications. On the server side, the Windows NT Option Pack boosts the enterprise scalability of NT. Of all the products we looked at, only Visual InterDev provides a transaction-processing monitor and a queuing system for asynchronous communication.

The NT Option Pack includes Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS), Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ), and Internet Information Server (IIS). Of course, all Microsoft components utilize COM and DCOM programming models.

On the development side, Microsoft lets organizations leverage the existing Visual Basic and COM skills of their developers. The development tool is substantially improved over previous versions, with one of the better database design tools around.

Visual InterDev surpasses the other products we looked at in the areas of debugging and developer assistance, with color coding and code-completion features. Still, the tool is definitely best suited for skilled developers, as opposed to business managers or analysts.

Developers can even debug code across components written in different environments, such as Java code. Also, Visual InterDev and Visual J++ share the same shell environment. Source control is available through tight integration with Microsoft Visual Source Safe.

Depending on the nature of the application being built, you can have certain parts of the programming logic execute in the browser using Dynamic HTML, or on the server for widespread deployment using Active Server Pages (ASPs).

Web applications built with Microsoft's tools can be deployed only on Microsoft's IIS on Windows NT, with no current support for Unix or other Web servers--though a third-party product, Chili!ASP from Chili!Soft, provides limited portability for ASPs.

With Windows NT's MTS component, an ASP can be treated as a transaction object, thus maintaining transaction integrity for operations such as a currency transfer in a banking application. The application server can communicate with the client using DCOM in a synchronous communication environment, or using MSMQ in an asynchronous environment.

Overall, Microsoft's offerings are good for experienced developers, but they lack key features such as dynamic load balancing. Any load balancing must be manually programmed, complicating the development effort.

NetDynamics 4.0
NetDynamics focuses on high- end enterprise applications where scalability, availability, and manageability are critical. Among the products reviewed, NetDynamics 4.0 showed a level of product-line maturity matched by few others.

The NetDynamics Application Server is the nucleus of the system. The server makes use of the Corba/IIOP specification for distributed computing between the client and the server, and also between one server and another server. The server provides robust system services such as database access and connection pooling, security, and cluster support. Dynamic load balancing is a strength, but it's performed only at the service level, as opposed to giving some applications priority over others.