The rift between IBM and Microsoft over Web services has widened further as Web services evangelists from each company clashed over the relative merits of .Net and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) for building applications that can talk to each other over the Internet.
IBM"s senior consultant architect Keith Edwards and Microsoft group manager for .Net technical evangelism, Neil Hutson, were speaking at the NetEvents industry gathering in Montreux, Switzerland.
Edwards" biggest criticism was levied at Microsoft"s .Net programming model, which was developed after Sun won its lawsuit charging that Microsoft had hijacked the Java language. In particular, said Edwards, Microsoft"s decision to support dozens of programming languages was fundamentally flawed. "Programmers don"t come screaming to me saying "I want five different programming languages,"" he said, stressing the wide acceptance of Java.