With the release of Windows .net later this year, Microsoft plans
to offer users a platform for building Web services by positioning
.net as an application server
Now available, the first release candidate of Windows .net
intensifies Microsoft's assault on the Web application server
market, dominated by Java 2.0 Enterprise Edition.
Brian Valentine, Windows division senior vice-president at
Microsoft, said, "With Windows .net server and beyond we will
really target enterprise class applications."
He said the company's mission was to provide a platform for global
scale computing.
Bill Verghte, corporate vice-president .net server management, said
Windows .net offered developers an entirely new way to program
applications. Verghte said the combination of Visual Studio .net,
released earlier this year, and Windows .net provides developers
with a server platform to develop, deploy and run Web services
applications.
One of the key components in Microsoft's application server
strategy is support for UDDI (universal description discovery and
integration) within Windows .net.
In Microsoft's vision, application software is developed using
in-house and external software components that encapsulate business
functionality. These components are stored within a Web service,
which describes what it does (in other words, the data it provides
back to an application) and the data it requires in order to
work.
In software development terminology, Microsoft's approach "is a
classic old-school repository", said Angela Mills, product unit
manager for UDDI at Microsoft. "We are driving the efficiency of
[component] reuse throughout a company."
Mills said that once users have a central repository they are able
to provide a degree of standardisation for software development
within the company. "It is possible to abstract the client
application from specific instances of the backend," she added.
In other words, the same back end system can be used to provide
services for a multitude of front end IT systems.
While UDDI promises to revolutionise software development users
face the prospect of an immense task cataloguing all the functions
in their existing software, so that they can be reused as web
services.
The task is, in some ways, similar to enterprise application
integration. The good news, according to Microsoft, is that reverse
engineering work from Y2K projects can be reused to load Cobol
applications into the UDDI.
This repository-based approach to development is not a new concept
but previous attempts have been proprietary.
Ovum analyst Gary Barnett said that one of the problems with
traditional software framework tools was that they required "an
all-or-nothing approach".
He said they were very closed environments and did not support
external interfaces properly. Since UDDI is open and supports XML,
Barnett believed Microsoft had a good chance of migrating
developers onto its repository-based approach to software
development.
But there could be a hidden cost in doing so. In a report published
in June, Gartner analysts Ray Valdes and Mark Driver highlighted a
number of hidden costs users would incur on moving from existing
Windows development to the Windows .net platform.
Although .net builds on the established Microsoft technology, users
needed to take into account training time for their developers.
Gartner said the learning costs can be amortised across a number of
projects, but the impact on schedule needs to be taken into
account.
The analysts urged developers to work on pilot projects or
non-critical applications to gain a working knowledge of .net that
goes beyond the concepts covered during training.
Another big cost for reworking applications for .net is testing,
taking at least 20% of a project's overall budget. Irrespective of
how much of an application's code is redeveloped for Windows .net,
Gartner said the whole application would need to be tested before
it is put into production.