A new article from IBM Alamedan research centre describes the differences between IBM's pre-release of its Web Services Development Environment and Microsoft's first beta release of Visual Studio .NET.

Read How the IBM Web Services Development Environment and Toolkit Compares with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET.

Here we go again. M$ is once again proved to be good on ideas but bad on implementation.

>>The .NET model does not distinguish between interface and implementation, and therefore does not support the idea of abstract Web services. Second, the .NET model does not distinguish between a service and a service provider (someone who hosts a service). Naturally a service provider could be an entity, such as a company, which hosts various services (Web service applications). Third, there's no service registry (directory for services) available. These three issues are currently limiting the design possibilities>>

It appears that these chaps have not learnt the golden OO rule - program to an interface not an implementation. More worrying is the fact that M$oft cannot seem to make up its mind on what names to give their technology - SCL SDL - .NET lib NGWS lib. Really amusing that M$' hyped .NET was mooted long before IBM's offer but you would'nt know by the current state of things....

Oh well we live in interesting times indeed.

Looks like the IBM effort is a step in the right direction... At least they are using Java for the runtime and the architecture is more open (so far!).

Greg.