Viewpoints-The Battle for the Enterprise continues

Viewpoints

Microsoft is promoting its Distributed interNet Applications Architecture (DNA) as a platform for developing fully distributed enterprise applications. There are six core fundamental technologies which are part of Microsoft Component Services without which DNA would not be possible. They are,

• COM - the ability to define components,
• DCOM - the ability to take these components and move them onto another machine,
• MTS - the component runtime environment in which components live, which watches requests coming into components and participates in processing them, providing security, automatic transaction management and a scaleable environment.
• MS DTC - Distributed Transaction Coordinator which is very similar to CORBA’s Object Transaction Service which automatically handles distributed two-phase commits in enterprise applications.
• MSMQ - code-named The Falcon, which is the asynchronous messaging capability and is somewhat similar to CORBA’s dynamic invocation interface.
• MSCS - Microsoft’s Clustering Technology code-named The Wolf Pack - which allows bringing together very small little server machines in a bunch with Wolfpack as a good glue that holds them together for creating highly robust and very scaleable applications

While Microsoft today is a one-stop shop for a viable set of distributed object application tools, Sun’s JavaSoft has created an environment where an industry of third-party distributed tools-and-platforms have started to flourish.

Sun is promoting its Java Platform for the Enterprise (JPE) as a core technology for developing multi-tier distributed applications. There are six fundamental technologies that are part of this.

• EJB - the ability to develop and deploy scalable, transactional, multi-user secure, distributed enterprise-level server application components.
• Java/RMI - the ability to remotely invoke Java objects and their methods on different virtual machines
• JNDI - which provides Java applications with a unified interface to multiple naming and directory services on the enterprise.
• JDBC - the Java version of ODBC for database connectivity
• JTS - the ability to provide the transaction system infrastructure required to support an application run time environment.
• JMS - Java’s messaging capability.

Update: Sun has since renamed Java Platform for the Enterprise (JPE) to Java 2, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and has come out with a Reference Implementation for it.