Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Microsoft holds out olive branch on Java

March 31, 2004 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft holds out olive branch on Java

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Microsoft may not exactly embrace Java, but the company is at least making strides toward accommodation.

In attending recent Microsoft developer conferences, including the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in September and VSLive last week, I searched in vain on the agendas for something, anything, to do with acknowledging Java as a force in development, other than sessions on how to migrate Java programs over to .Net.

But a recently published free, online book by Microsoft seems to recognize that coexistence is going to happen between .Net and Java.

This book, Application Interoperabil-ity: Microsoft .Net and J2EE, was published earlier this year.

In publishing the book, Microsoft is realizing that there will be multiple, different back-end systems that an application needs to interoperate with, Rich-ard Burte, Microsoft technical product manager for the company's developer divi-sion, said. "J2EE is one of those platforms," Burte said. The book is focused on making systems work together, he said.

Microsoft and Java founder Sun Microsystems have gone back and forth in court in a dispute over Microsoft’s use of Java. Microsoft even has a utility, Java Language Conversion Assistant, to migrate Java code to .Net.

At attendee at VSLive, however, concurred that coexistence will be the order of the day for the two platforms. "The degree to which it’s peaceful coexistence is yet to be seen," said the attendee, Daniel Appleman, president of Campbell, Calif.;-based Visual Studio components developer Desaware.

Posted by Paul Krill on March 31, 2004 11:00 AM

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