Sent: Thursday, October 16, 1997 12:36 PM
From: Roger Sessions[SMTP:roger@objectwatch.com]
To: SubscriptionList
Subject: ObjectWatch Newsletter # 7
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ObjectWatch Newsletter Number 7
Focus on Distributed Object Technology
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Main Story: Java - The Microsoft Perspective
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JAVA - THE MICROSOFT PERSPECTIVE
Within the last week, I have heard that Microsoft
a) is trying to take over Java
b) is trying to hide from Java
c) deserves to be sued by Sun for crimes against humanity
d) should be revered among mortals for its weighty accomplishments
and last but not least, the humble, but ever so popular
e) loves Java
f) hates Java
I have spent much of the last year researching Microsoft's position on
Java. I needed to understand this issue for my new book (COM and DCOM;
Microsoft's Vision for Distributed Objects). I have read every memo,
news release, and white paper I could find on this topic. I have spoken
to many of Microsoft's Java team. For better or worse, I seem to have
become the leading expert on What Microsoft Thinks of Java. In fact,
based on some of my recent discussions, I suspect I understand this
issue better than most people who work at Microsoft.
But before I can get into Microsoft's Java perspective, I need to give
you some background. First, I need to give you some historical
perspective on where Java is coming from. Second, I need to do some
level setting on what Java is about technically. Third, I need to tell
you what Microsoft is trying to accomplish over the next five years.
Within this background, we will be able to discuss what Microsoft really
thinks about Java.
JAVA HISTORY
Lets start with the history of Java. Java was introduced by Sun. Many
companies jumped on the Java bandwagon. The most notable of these early
adopters was IBM.
What fueled this odd alliance between Sun and IBM? The incredible
superiority of Java as a programming technology? Unlikely. Remember,
this alliance was formed back when Java had the most minimal of
capabilities and was hardly more than a toy.
We can get some insight into the purpose of this alliance by looking at
the last time these two companies joined together to lead a major
industry effort. This last collaboration resulted in the distributed
object technology known as CORBA, produced by an industry consortium
called the Object Management Group (OMG).
I was very involved in the OMG. I worked for IBM at the time, and I was
a lead architect for one of the CORBA services. I wrote my last book on
this topic (Object Persistence; Beyond Object-Oriented Databases).
The OMG consortium was held together by one common purpose: to stop
Microsoft. The OMG failed in this effort, and is now limping along with
only a few companies making even a minimal profit on CORBA technologies.
Many people accuse Microsoft of meeting any technological threat with an
embrace and smother strategy. This is certainly not true of Microsoft's
reaction to CORBA. Despite the millions of dollars that IBM, Sun, and
others were spending on CORBA, Microsoft never took CORBA seriously.
Microsoft joined the OMG, and occasionally sent a representative to OMG
meetings, but looked on the whole affair with an air of amusement, as if
it was watching children at play.
By 1994, it was clear to Sun and IBM (and later Netscape and the rest of
the industry) that OMG was not going to be the knight in shining armor
that would protect them from the Microsoft dragon. So they started
looking for a new protector. And they thought they found it in Java.
Soon most of the industry had jumped on the Love-Java/Stop-Microsoft
bandwagon.
JAVA TECHNOLOGY
Why did the industry think Java would stop Microsoft? For that matter,
what exactly was the industry trying to stop Microsoft from doing?
Sun and IBM in particular saw the whole world moving into the direction
of Microsoft operating systems. IBM had been humiliated in its attempt
to have OS/2 taken seriously. Sun was dependent on the success of its
Solaris flavor of Unix.
But the operating system vendors were in a bad position. By 1995, most
of the world's computer's were running some version of Windows. Nobody
was going to write new software for anything other than Windows.
In Java, the industry thought it had a mechanism to write software than
would run on any operating system. For operating system vendors, this
would be great. Suddenly it wouldn't matter if they only owned a sliver
of the operating system market, they could still offer software vendors
a viable market. So Sun and IBM led the charge to creat write-once/run-
everywhere (WO/RE) software using Java.
Java promised a WO/RE solution through a combination of tried and true
technologies. These included a language specification, a pseudo-
compiler, a virtual machine, and a series of libraries. These libraries
were to be available on all Java platforms and were to define the
"official" WO/RE Java API. These libraries are basic to WO/RE and
according to Sun and IBM, WO/RE is basic to Java.
Java is not the first time the industry has been promised a WO/RE
solution. In fact, this has been a recurrent theme since the dawn of
software. Unix, CORBA, and C++ are just a few examples of the many
products that originally made similar claims.
George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned
to repeat it." Unfortunately, the collective memory of our industry
seems particularly poor. WO/RE has never worked and it seems unlikely to
me that it ever will. And we appear to be caught in an endless cycle of
relearning this lesson.
The WO/RE dream faces a technological dilemma. Users, spoiled group that
they are, have come to expect a high quality interactive experience and
rich functionality. Software can only meet these expectations by taking
every possible advantage of underlying operating system services. But
software that takes advantage of underlying operating system services
will not run everywhere. Software that really runs everywhere can only
use technology that exists everywhere. Services that are universally
available are going to be universally bland. Software built on such
bland services can only end up as the McDonalds of software: offending
nobody but impressing nobody.
While software vendors care that their products run everywhere, their
users don't. A user cares only that a product runs well on one
particular machine, the one at which the user is working. A product
written for generic services will never be able to compete for that
user's heart against a product written especially for that user's
operating system.
Although the failure of WO/RE was predictable, many software vendors
couldn't resist the lure. They worked hard to write products using only
Java and the WO/RE libraries. These vendors have all learned their
lessons the hard way. To the best of my knowledge, there isn't a major
software vendor left still developing a commercial product based on the
WO/RE capability of the Java libraries.
But the fact that WO/RE doesn't work doesn't mean that Java should be
abandoned. We don't want to throw out the baby with the bath water. Java
is still a great language, much better than C++. The problem is not in
the language, but in the WO/RE libraries. Even then, the real problem is
not so much the libraries themselves, but the edict that these libraries
constitute the entire range of Java programming possibilities.
MICROSOFT GOALS
Microsoft's goal for the next five years is simple. It wants NT to be
the platform of choice for doing distributed commerce applications. This
basically sets the stage for a new war, and the battleground is the
three-tier architecture.
Microsoft believes that the three-tier architecture will form the basis
for distributed commerce. Three-tier architectures define a client tier,
a component tier, and a data tier. The client tier has long been owned
by Microsoft. Microsoft is now going after the component tier with a
vengeance and is preparing to undergo a battle of attrition for the data
tier.
Microsoft has defined an architecture that supports distributed
applications based on components. A component is a package of software
that can do specific, well defined tasks. Components can communicate
with other components, and this communication can occur within a tier or
across tiers.
Microsoft wants to be in the three-tier component plumbing business. It
wants to provide the operating systems on which three-tier component
based software systems will run. Microsoft will happily support any
products that fit within this vision, and will not support those that do
not. The most important pieces of Microsoft's plumbing are COM, DCOM,
and MTS. These will all eventually be merged into COM+.
THE MICROSOFT POSITION ON JAVA
Now that we have looked at Java's history, Java's technology, and
Microsoft's technical agenda, we can better understand Microsoft's
position on Java.
It would be logical to assume that Microsoft hates Java. After all, Java
was charged from its birth with the task of bringing Microsoft to its
knees. And this was, in fact, Microsoft's original position on Java.
But then two things happen to cause Microsoft to rethink this position.
First, the cadre of highly intelligent and incessantly curious Microsoft
engineers discovered how much easier it was to work with Java than with
C or C++. Second, Microsoft discovered that Java is an ideal language
for implementing the kind of components on which it had based its whole
corporate strategy.
So Microsoft did an about-face, and threw its full strength behind Java
the language. I see no evidence that this support has slacked off in the
slightest. Microsoft seems fully committed to providing the best tools
available for creating components using Java. Although Microsoft will
always support other component development languages, I believe Java is
Microsoft's language of choice for implementing the software that will
run on the component tier.
But then there is the issue of the Java Write-Once/Run-Everywhere
libraries. Here Microsoft diverges from the rest of the Java community,
and in particular, from Sun.
Some of these WO/RE libraries are intended to support user interfaces.
Microsoft has much better tools for building the software that will run
on the client tier than Java. Some of these tools, such as DHTML, are
even going to be available for non-Microsoft platforms. I agree with
Microsoft that Java is an inferior technology for user interfaces.
Some of these WO/RE libraries are directly competitive with Microsoft's
architecture. Java's Remote Method Invocation (RMI) capability, for
example, allows Java objects to communicate across process boundaries.
Microsoft sees this as competing with DCOM. In my opinion, RMI is not
even in the same league as COM/DCOM/MTS, and doesn't begin to address
important issues like language independence, object pooling, security,
and transactional support. But those WO/RE libraries that Microsoft
views, rightly or wrongly, as competing with its own architecture are
going to get lukewarm support, at best.
Microsoft believes the COM/DCOM/MTS architecture is an advanced
component runtime environment, and Java components should be allowed to
take full advantage of everything this environment offers. Obviously
components that do take advantage of this environment are not going to
work in a non-COM/DCOM/MTS environment. But, the reasoning goes, do you
want full featured components that work well in the environment for
which they are intended, or insipid components that will run on any
toaster that happens to have a microchip with an embedded Java virtual
machine?
Microsoft does not support the WO/RE philosophy. If you are jaded, you
might argue WO/RE is in conflict with Microsoft's self interest. But I
believe WO/RE is a fantasy outside of the trivial world of browser
applets. The Java WO/RE libraries today don't come even close to
providing the rich infrastructure needed by distributed commerce
applications.
Part of the current legal dispute between Sun and Microsoft has to do
with vision and part has to do with control.
Sun's vision for Java is much different than Microsoft's. Sun sees Java
as a complete object milieu, providing a total API package for
everything from user interface to communications to database access.
Microsoft sees Java as a good language for developing components that
live on one of the three tiers, specifically, the component tier. It
does not believe that programmers should be forced to use Java on the
other tiers where Java is basically inferior technology just because
they are using it on the component tier. And it does not believe that
Java programmers should be forced to program in a medieval runtime
environment as the price for using the language.
Sun seems to be saying that Microsoft wants to take control of Java. I
find this argument unconvincing. I hear Microsoft saying that nobody
should control Java. Different companies should be able to improve Java
as they see fit. An open and free market is the appropriate forum to
decide on the future of Java, not law courts and corporate cartels.
Programmers who want a WO/RE environment should be free to choose WO/RE
implementations. Programmers who want to do heavy duty commerce
applications should be free to choose industrial strength
implementations and runtime environments. If any company is trying to
control Java, it is obvious to me that that company is Sun, not
Microsoft.
In my studying of the Microsoft distributed component architecture,
including Java, COM, DCOM, MTS, Falcon, and Wolfpack, I have found that
Microsoft consistently provides open frameworks that encourage the
participation of third parties, even when those third parties are
selling products that directly compete with Microsoft. In some cases
Microsoft doesn't even wait for its competitors to plug into the
Microsoft frameworks, Microsoft writes the plugs for them! Does this
sound like the stance of a company that is afraid to compete?
So I think we can summarize Microsoft's position on Java very simply. It
fully supports and really likes Java the language. It is committed to
providing competitive tools for developing Java components to run on the
component tier. As far as the libraries and Java run-time environment,
it says let each company provide the best underlying support for Java
that it can, and may the best architecture win.
- Roger Sessions, October 16, 1997
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Roger Sessions is the author of COM and DCOM; Microsoft's Vision for
Distributed Objects, published by John Wiley. World wide availability
will be November 1997.
ObjectWatch, Inc., offers a one day overview of the Microsoft
Distributed Component Architecture, including COM, DCOM, MTS, Falcon,
and Wolfpack. It is taught by Roger Sessions, author of four books and
dozens of articles and a frequent conference speaker. Visit our web page
at http://www.objectwatch.com <http://www.objectwatch.com> or contact Roger
Sessions at
roger@objectwatch.com <mailto:roger@objectwatch.com>
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# 6: Letter From the Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference
# 5: The World's Largest Software Company
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--- end forwarded text
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Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
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experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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