Recent writings of David Chappell in ADT -- ADTmag

Recent writings of David Chappell in ADT

September 29, 2004

David Chappell is principal at Chappell & Associates, an education and consulting firm focused on enterprise software technologies including Microsoft .NET. He shares his insights regularly with readers of Application Development Trends and adtmag.com. Here is a sampling of recent writings.

.NET & Beyond: J2EE split ending war with .NET
The big story in app development for the past few years has been the competition between Microsoft’s .NET Framework and products that support the J2EE specs. Lots of people have talked about it, and many development organizations have been faced with this issue. To a large extent, the .NET vs. J2EE struggle has defined the recent app development landscape. This won’t be true much longer.

Take your pick: Business processes or Bangalore
Business processes matter. And two of today’s biggest trends, offshoring and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), will soon make them matter even more to software professionals. My guess is that over the next few years, many people working in IT will face a simple choice. One option is to get involved with business processes in a much more explicit way. The other? Pack your bags and move to Bangalore, India, because that is where your job is going to go.

Too much, too soon
How fast can Microsoft change technologies? More importantly, how fast can developers learn and exploit the new technologies that Microsoft produces? .

Indigo: The end of the rainbow
When it finally ships, the Longhorn release of Windows will include a number of interesting new technologies. But it is the technology currently code-named “Indigo” that stands out as the most important product for anyone who cares about how diverse systems are glued together.

Why Web services aren't just a rerun
Web services can seem too good to be true. After decades of disagreement, all of the major vendors have finally bought into a common approach to connecting applications. It's hard not to harbor some doubts about whether this technology will live up to its promise.

.NET and Beyond: The big bet
I can’t help admiring the ambition of people working on Web services security. The problem they face -- creating multivendor agreements on authentication, authorization and more for SOAP -- is tremendously difficult. Not only that, but in a very real sense, no one has ever solved this problem before. Complete multi-vendor security for distributed applications? Please -- it’s been a pipe dream. Yet the existing Web services work in this area is actually nearing completion.

.NET & Beyond: One more time: What exactly is .NET?
I know marketing people who think that creating confusion in the minds of customers is a good thing. “If they’re confused,” one of them told me, “they’ll need to come to us to get things cleared up.” None of the marketing people I know with this attitude work at Microsoft, but it can sometimes seem as if Microsoft’s marketers think this way, too. A case in point is .NET.