The Web services grid
By my reckoning, J2EE was conceived at Microsoft in 1996,
when legendary database guru Jim Gray was hired to lead the
Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) project. In MTS, which begat
both COM+ and J2EE, the COM object was the unit of distributed
computation. (For J2EE, substitute EJB for COM.) MTS provided a
services fabric into which those objects were woven, and from which
they acquired transactioning, load balancing, and object pooling.
MTS was repackaged as COM+ for Windows NT 4.0. Now it's been
carried forward to .Net Server as the guts of
System.EnterpriseServices, the .Net Framework classes that nicely
encapsulate the COM+ engine. The idea behind all this was that an
ordinary VB (Visual Basic) programmer could use MTS/COM+ to build
scalable, transactional apps. All you had to do, Microsoft
promised, was "write to COM." No doubt about it, this was a great
idea. One astute observer, Roger Sessions, has said that "COMWare"
(COM+ and J2EE) represents "the democratization of the middle
tier." The timing was perfect. Just as NT 4 got rolling, the Web
began pushing "ordinary" VB apps harder than anyone could have
imagined. [Full story at
InfoWorld.com.]
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/10/24.html#a480