"Why waste valuable resources and reinvent the wheel when you can assemble applications with prebuilt, pretested components?" was the quuestion posed to a group of expert panelists at this years Java One. A new article on java.sun.com discusses their view and offers two real world examples of components in action.

WORKING SMARTER: Building With J2EE Components.

The availability of third party software for a specific architecture/platform can sell J2EE into companies. It is why IBM ruled in the old mainframe days. Vendors would write applications for the market leader ie. MVS. If there are enough J2EE compliant applications out there then J2EE can be very successful. The opposition is .Net. If M$ can get enough third party vendors to support them then J2EE may have a hard time. Mind you J2EE is here now (and not vapourware) so the secret to J2EE prospering is to get applications out to market asap. Let's hope that J2EE is the VHS of the application market world..

I gree, .NET will be a "strong" competitor in the future.

But, we are living a new age in the e-business world. The "Web Services" age. Now it's time for sys integrators and for ruge spiral software development efforts, involving different people, companies, vendors and plataforms.

Distributed development to meet increasing software demand.

That's the new age...

J2EE .NET .... ZOPE !? No matter. We need software, and fast. Web services is the glue.