Will .NET Framework Shatter COM? - Company Business and Marketing

ENT, August 16, 2000 by JOSEPH McKENDRICK

When Microsoft Corp.'s .NET platform becomes a reality, developers of every stripe will be able to bring their applications onto the Windows platform. That was the vision unveiled at July's Professional Developers Conference in Orlando, Fla. There, Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) made public the .NET Framework, which will enable developers to build applications and services on its .NET Platform.

The .NET Framework consists of a common language runtime. This enables developers to integrate applications written in COBOL, Fortran, or other languages to run in a Windows environment. Another feature is Active Server Pages (ASP ), Microsoft's successor to ASP. ASP compiles Web pages, thus opening the door for compiled languages such as COBOL to be used directly in Web pages where only interpreted languages were previously usable.

Analysts agree that the common language runtime is the most significant part of the announcement. The common language runtime lets developers build applications on Windows with a range of languages.

Significantly, the new framework could supplant Microsoft's COM. The .NET Framework does not use the COM classes. "This is the first step in Microsoft retiring COM," says Mark Driver, research director at GartnerGroup Inc. (www.gartner.com). The framework uses a new set of classes that replace the COM classes. "Microsoft has created a whole new component model and platform on top of the operating system, which is completely independent of COM and DCOM," he adds.

Most applications running in Windows are built on COM. "You can imagine the tremendous cultural shock [that replacing COM] is going to have on Microsoft developers. Microsoft is literally changing the entire rulebook now, abandoning a vision that they have introduced and fostered for the past five years or more. They're effectively abandoning COM," he says. Driver and other analysts warn that most current COM applications will have to be changed to become fully compatible with the new architecture. New Windows applications must be developed to a different set of APIs.

"This common language runtime will allow developers to choose the language that's appropriate to solve the business problem," says Uttam Narsu, vice president at Giga Information Group Inc. (www.gigaweb.com). "The application can then be tied with C or Visual Basic." Narsu notes that many developers still work in Fortran because of its higher level of performance with numerical calculations.

This facility helps shatter the illusion that there should be one language for all purposes, Narsu continues. "One language can never solve all problems," he says. "That would be like saying we can have one tool for all jobs at a construction site. A general purpose tool just never does anything particularly well. We will always heed special-purpose languages."

Essentially, you can draw a parallel between common language runtime (CLR) and universal platforms such as Java Virtual Machine. "CLR is about halfway between a runtime library and a full-blown virtual machine," Driver says.

One mainframe vendor, Fujitsu Corp. (www.fujitsu.com), announced it is constructing a new COBOL compiler to target the common language runtime so COBOL programmers have access the .NET Framework. "When we set out to build elements of the .NET Framework, we realized that we would need to provide the ability for languages such as COBOL to take full advantage of the framework," says John Montgomery, group product manager for the .NET Framework at Microsoft.

While the .NET Framework and common language runtime won't win any new converts to Microsoft, it will help the company's push into the enterprise space, Driver says. "At very minimum, this makes them a much better neighbor. It makes it much easier to interoperate Windows with CICS [Customer Information Control System] using SOAP and XML. Microsoft has always struggled to push into the enterprise space because its always been a homogenous environment."

Microsoft hopes to open its platform to multiple development environments in the process. This could, for example, encompass Linux using XML and CORBA and Java. "[Microsoft's] hope is that by having the best tools, the best environment, and the best richness, they can attract people purely on the Windows platform," Narsu says. The success of this strategy hinges on whether other large vendors support the initiative. "It's a little bit of a gamble, but not a big one," he says. Microsoft announced that about 100 industry partners are supporting the NET Framework, including 70 ISVs.

Some development vendors are expressing enthusiasm for the concept. "It has been a headache to take pieces from multiple languages and make them work together," says Bertrand Meyer, president of Interactive Software Engineering Inc. (www.eiffel.com), producer of Eiffel software development tools. "Most developers give up and work in a single-language environment. They either get stuck with decisions they made a decade ago or undergo costly conversion efforts."