Microsoft Announces Broadside Against Java

Microsoft will be providing tools and services by the end of the year for moving Java programs to its competing .NET Framework. The announcement of its strategy for migrating Java-based programs into the .NET world—called the Java User Migration Path to .NET (JUMP to .NET)—ends Microsoft’s long silence about its plans for Java, and comes shortly after settling a lawsuit with Sun Microsystems over Java patent infringements. At this point, the technical details of JUMP to .NET are remarkably slim, indicating that this announcement may have been made in part to help stem the tide of organizations moving their Java components to other platforms by staking out mindshare.

Java’s History at Microsoft

The Java platform is viewed by many analysts as the conceptual precursor to the .NET Framework, Microsoft’s new libraries and runtime environment for Windows, currently in beta. (For details on the .NET Framework, see “Developers Get First Look at .NET Framework” on page 21 of the Aug. 2000 Update and “Visual Studio Gets Serious About .NET” on page 12 of the Jan. 2001 Update.) Created by Sun, the Java platform includes the Java language and a set of libraries designed to run over a common run-time engine, called a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which in turn can be hosted on any operating system. When implemented according to Sun’s rules, Java source code will run in any operating environment that hosts a JVM. The idea of completely severing the ties between the language and the details of managing the run-time platform has proven to be very compelling for both improving run-time reliability and for allowing code to be written once and then executed in many environments.