News

Java and .NET Camps Split Over SOA

• By Kurt Mackie
• 08/09/2007

The research firm conducted a survey in June of this year, polling nearly 400 developers working on Web services projects. Those results were compared with survey findings measured in the past six months.

The new survey found that .NET still held the lead, with 31 percent of developers planning to use that platform. However, that lead was a narrow one, as 28 percent of respondents expected that Java would be their platform of choice for SOA development.

Java for SOA development had a positive bounce in the survey over the sixth-month period. However, the survey results for .NET use weren't as rosy. Nearly 20 percent fewer respondents indicated a preference for using the .NET platform for SOA development compared with the response recorded six months before.

John Andrews, CEO of Evans Data Corp., cited activity in the open source Eclipse development community as one of the main reasons for the apparent migration to using Java.

"There's currently a lot of activity in the open source world, and particularly in the Eclipse communities, around SOA," he stated in a press release. "Most of the major players in that space are introducing new solutions aimed at SOA, and they are almost invariably Java-based. Open source SOA looks poised to become a real force in the industry and consequently a serious contender to .NET."

More than one in five respondents reported that SOA was already adopted by their companies for company-wide implementations.

The majority (70 percent) of respondents indicated that cost savings were being realized with SOAs. Respondents cited code reuse and automation of IT processes as the primary reasons for cost savings.

Respondents found that testing and validating Web services posed the "greatest challenge for developing an SOA." However, justifying a company's return on investment from SOA was just as tough, according to survey results.

The findings are part of Evans Data's semiannual market intelligence report, which the company expects to publish on Monday.