I was quite amused by a series of articles talking about the battle between Java and .NET that appeared in mid-January. One article said that Java has a two-to-one lead over .NET based on an informal online poll. Meanwhile, in an article entitled "Outlook: Java tech trends through 2004," Mark Driver at Gartner claimed, "Microsoft's emerging NET platform will continue to garner most of the vision and mind share for Web-services-based development efforts." And in an article entitled, "Enterprise Java Bulks Up," Thomas Murphy of META Group said, "The lack of standards support will not enable Java to compete as effectively with the challenge raised by Microsoft .Net." With such drastically differing opinions out there, I thought it would be entertaining to conduct my own investigation. Since I don't have the resources to conduct a statistically significant survey, I decided to base my research on newsgroup and discussion list traffic. The way I figure it, traffic on these forums should be a good indication of the actual use of the technology.

I conducted my research in early January, and here's what I found. Developmentor hosts a number of popular discussion groups at http://discuss.develop.com. The most popular one is the DOTNET group, which has over 2,800 members and usually exchanges 100-200 messages a day. The traffic on this one group exceeds the traffic on all other Web services-related discussion groups combined. Based on this, one might assume that .NET is the clear winner - but only if you're comparing .NET with the entire Java platform. When I looked inside the DOTNET discussion list, I found that most of the discussions focus on the .NET framework, C#, ASP.Net, and ADO.Net. I wanted to limit my study to Web services development - and by that I actually mean SOAP development. So, using a loose statistical process (I analyzed five weeks worth of messages), I estimated that approximately 15% of the DOTNET discussion list traffic pertains to Microsoft SOAP development, which is an average of about 675 messages per month.

Another very popular forum hosted by Developmentor is the SOAP discussion group. This group has over 1,700 members, who exchange an average of 180 messages per month. This is a nondenominational group, which happily discusses SOAP issues based on any implementation or language. You'll find discussions relating to Perl, PHP, Python, and PocketSoap, as well as .NET and Java. Using my loose statistical process, I estimated that 50% of traffic pertains to .NET, 35% pertains to Java, and 15% pertains to other languages.

I next examined Microsoft's discussion lists at http://msdn.microsoft.com/newsgroups/. There appear to be three active discussion lists related to Web services: xml.soap, xml.soapsdk, and msdn.webservices. The combined traffic on these three lists adds up to approximately 990 messages per month. Then I started looking for Java discussions. Most Java SOAP discussions are sponsored by the SOAP implementation providers forums. Based on that traffic, the three most popular Java SOAP implementations are Apache SOAP, Systinet WASP, and The Mind Electric GLUE. Apache sponsors two user discussion lists (soap-user and axis-user) with more than 1500 members. Combined, the two lists exchange an average of 600 messages per month. The archives are available at http://marc.theaimsgroup.com. Systinet provides a newsletter list and a developer discussion forum. There are more than 3000 subscribers to the newsletter and more than 350 members in the discussion forum. The Systinet discussion group, at http://list.systinet.com, exchanges an average of 550 messages each month. The Mind Electric uses Yahoo Groups to host its discussion list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MindElectricTechnology. There are more than 900 members in this group, who exchange an average of 360 messages each month.

In addition to the major players, I also found a little bit of traffic at each of the other Java-based SOAP vendor sites, including Oracle, Cape Clear, HP, Iona, IBM, BEA, and Borland (in order by volume). Oracle averages approximately 75 messages per month; the others between 30 and 45 messages per month.

I found two other popular SOAP discussions. Borland's Web services discussion list for Delphi at www.borland.com/newsgroups gets traffic comparable to that for Apache. And Simon Fell's PocketSOAP discussion at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/pocketsoap has more than 100 members who exchange an average of 80 messages per mouth. So, let's take a moment and tally up the results. According to my calculations, Java wins by a nose with an average of 1,868 messages per month, capturing 43% of discussion traffic. .NET is a close second with 1,755 messages per month, or 41% of traffic. And "other" (Delphi, C++, PHP, Perl, Python, Frontier, etc.) rounds out the landscape with 16% of traffic, averaging 707 messages per month. In other words, interoperability is what's really important.

Anne Thomas Manes