InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
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August 14, 2000 |
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Web Development Platforms
Stealing Java's Thunder
Microsoft's upcoming Visual Studio.net offers an integrated development interface, a new programming language, and programming shortcuts that should result in more-efficient Web development. A secondary, unstated aim is to slow Java's progress.
By Don Kiely
he unspoken intent of Microsoft's Visual Studio.net is to challenge Java's hold over enterprise-scale Web development. In the process, Microsoft hopes to deliver a Web development platform that enables the rapid deployment of Web services that can be integrated into business applications. For example, a currency-conversion service could be used in a variety of Web applications ranging from online banking to retailing.The promise of Visual Studio.net is to help IT departments greatly reduce development time and the custom coding required to create distributed, multiplatform applications.
Visual Studio.net sports a common development environment across all products in the package. Its support for Web services and close integration with the newest incarnation of Active Server Pages (ASP+), server scripting technology, serves to reduce the amount of coding required to build complex, distributed applications.
Visual Studio.net is more oriented toward Web and distributed application development than its Visual Studio predecessors. Combined with major upgrades to several of the company's server products, Visual Studio .net could change the way companies do Web development. Of course, Microsoft has to ship the product first. Developers aren't likely to see a commercial offering until next year.
Microsoft's premise is that most future business application development will revolve around a connected universe of Internet-aware systems, software services, and devices. In the spirit of healthy competition, the company also hopes to slow the momentum of the trainload of Java-based tools and technologies that are increasingly prevalent in business development projects.
Visual Studio is Microsoft's suite of Windows development tools, consisting of Visual Basic, Visual C++ (including C#; see sidebar story "Microsoft's C# Likely Signals The Death Knell For Visual J++"), Visual FoxPro, and Visual InterDev. In version 6.0, Microsoft introduced tools for Web application development, such as support for its Internet Information Server (IIS), Active Server Pages, and Java development.
These features allowed developers to build bits and pieces of a Web site, especially Visual InterDev, a Web development tool for building HTML and script-based applications. However, the tools were best-suited for developing networked desktop applications.
Using version 6.0 for Web development is a bit like building an add-on to an add-on. This is why Visual Studio has the reputation of being sluggish on the Web.
Visual Studio.net will instead integrate closely with the underlying Web server and Windows operating system. This should allow developers to build new and far better Web services, integrating diverse resources available on the Web in ways that no desktop application could before.
The real trick will be to make the new versions of the tools continue to work as well for desktop application development as they do for Web development. This will be no simple task, but one that's critical if Visual Studio.net is to remain as widely used in IT shops as it is today. Even though Web development is today's hot technology, there remain a tremendous number of custom-developed Windows applications in use that are critical to a business' needs.
Microsoft hopes to pull off this hat trick through fundamental changes to its languages, development environments, and improved integration with the Windows operating system.
With its push to make Visual Studio the pre-eminent suite of Web development tools, the company is making a number of Web enhancements. Microsoft is implementing several new Web protocols and standards into the tools and is actively working on many of the World Wide Web Consortium's standards committees.
Even though a final version of a standard isn't yet available, Microsoft is implementing the working draft and pledging to support the final version when it becomes available.
Probably the most significant example of this kind of support for Web standards is the Extensible Markup Language and its extended family of protocols. Microsoft has been one of the major proponents of XML almost from the start and is implementing it as an integral part of its development tools.
One such XML-based technology is the Simple Object Access Protocol. Microsoft has joined with IBM and others to submit SOAP to the World Wide Web Consortium as a proposed standard. Even Microsoft adversary Sun Microsystems indicated in June that it would support SOAP, which provides a text-based means of invoking methods on a server. SOAP is a form of remote automation of the various components that make up a distributed application.
What's new and different about SOAP is that the method calls will typically be transferred via HTTP, the network protocol on which the Web is built. Because HTTP uses port 80 on a server by default, and this port is used by many organizations for open Web traffic, these calls can bypass firewalls, optionally encrypt data, and operate across operating and Web server platforms. This will make it almost trivial to bring together disparate Web resources from a variety of sources into a single, unified application.
Illustration by David Goldin
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