Rational Straddles Java and .NET (Continued)

Java and Integration
Q: The J2EE market gained strength because multiple important companies supported a standard set of APIs. How can the market avoid fragmentation as these platform vendors seek to differentiate their products?

Devlin: One way to deal with that is model-driven development. We see people using XDE to target multiple application servers.

But there's no doubt that if you want to fully exploit the capabilities of any application server, the resulting application will run better on that application server.

Q: Doesn't this repeat the issues with ANSI-SQL? If you are an Oracle developer, you write Oracle-specific code to get at important features of that RDBMS.

Devlin: Your database analogy is probably appropriate. There is a lot of code that can be moved between databases, but performance-sensitive code cannot. I think you'll see a similar set of things here. But remember the standards go beyond J2EE to include topics such as SOAP. So even if a company uses two different application servers, they can still be connected because of standards for communicating between those different applications—even if they are running in different environments.

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