What in the world is happening in the market? Technology moves so fast that sometimes it's a little hard to tell what is happening.


Let's take a short trip to the past.


It was not long ago that the applications were designed, developed and deployed on a single machine. For those of you who can remember the early days of the personal computer age, things like dbase, FoxBASE, and as the power ring a bell. Everything worked in the same machine - the user interface, business rules, and database services.


Then came local area networks, which ushered in the era of ClientServer applications. Now the user interface and business rules sat on the PC and sends requests to a client-server DBMS like Oracle or SQL Server, while the server side, the records were processed and the results are returned to the client.


As LANs matured and improved reliability, application development went through another evolution, namely the advent of 3-tier architecture. This transformation resulted in the user interface services, business rules and data of each become their own independent logical element in the architecture of the application. The physical world can be implemented each element on a different computer, but it was not necessary.


The main advantage of three-tier model is that business logic can now be divided into components, which could be used not only one but many applications. In addition, changes in business logic on the server does not require the caller or client to change at all. In other words, the details of implementing the business logic or function is not important as long as the road is called and the type of information that is returned unchanged. Let's face it, the world is changing rapidly and we must be able to adapt without having to re-deploy.


Of course, the initial application of 3-layer model (later to become the n-tier) focused primarily on common machines and operating systems, such as Intel, Windows and Unix. Vendors have the backing of his own brand of components. Microsoft supports COM, followed by DCOM. IBM promoted CORBA, RMI and Sun promoted. Each of these middle tier component flavors was proprietary and did not provide interoperability and communication between disparate pieces. For a Microsoft application to talk to a CORBA component another piece of software is required for translation. The same is true for applications trying to communicate with DCOM objects too.


All this makes it difficult for the various systems talk to each other, creating an increasingly important issue as tobusiness Internet business applications became the focus. The site, a relatively recent addition to the overall IT architecture has dramatically changed the way we develop applications and therefore the deployment of associated services.


If you log in Land's End, for example, it is unlikely that the underlying application will need to use components developed by a number of other parties such as American Express, MasterCard, Visa, UPS, FedEx, along with a number of systems internally to provide the consumer shopping experience overall.


Sun, with its Java language, was in the right place at the right time. The ability to be compiled Java byte code and run on any machine that had a Java virtual machine that gave portability. The fact that it was designed to be completely object oriented, the goal of web based applications, and observe the safety problems associated with distributed applications that made a great appeal to corporate customers.


Visual Basic, meanwhile, earned its stripes in the world of Windows-based applications development. It is easy to develop applications that leverage the operating system of the window, and as VB evolved it took more and more features that make it increasingly object-oriented, capable of creating reusable COM / DCOM objects, and a viable tool for applications based on the web. Today, Microsoft claims that more than 3 million Visual Basic programmers in the world.


Introduced in 1991, Visual Basic has gone through six versions. Each major power, performance, flexibility and capacity, leading to two major programming languages ??- Java and Visual Basic, with each field feel that your product is better.


The fact is that language is not really the key. The winner will be the platform framework / enabling the design, development and deployment of applications and take advantage of services or components distributed over the web.


With the release pending the next version of Visual Studio (of which VB is a part), Microsoft has decided to radically change the way their language works suite. The next version of Visual Studio called Visual Studio.Net or VS.Net, and the next version of Visual Basic will be called VB.Net. There are many new features and capabilities, but in my opinion, there are two major changes that Microsoft's move to center stage.


First, VS.Net will be a common development environment in which C #, C + +, VB, and along with about 14 other non-Microsoft languages ??connects. Language will be a matter of preference. This is mainly due to the fact that they all compile to the same level using common runtime module. Moreover, they all share the same class libraries. What this means is that a composite application components and services can be developed by a team of developers in multiple languages ??with the assurance that all work together.


If one were to look closely, you could see that the overall architecture that makes Java so popular is that the compiler output is not necessarily linked to the chipset or operating system. Not surprise me if Microsoft made the runtime module, which is similar in nature to the Java Virtual Machine, available to standards committees to be ported to other platformS. If this were to happen, VS.Net and VB.Net could take a big step forward in the race of languages.


The second important event that is parallel to the introduction of VS.Net is the advent of SOAP. Remember our earlier discussion of the different types of components trying to work with others? SOAP Simple Object Access Protocol and is an open standard based on XML or Extensible Markup Language, IBM, Sun and Microsoft have agreed now makes it possible for components developed with competition rules, to communicate. XML is used to describe the fundamental elements of a class, including the methods, the associated arguments and return values. While SOAP on the other hand, describes the interface including the path to the XML document. This will remove a major obstacle to interoperability in building distributed applications using Web services.


In summary, Java and Visual Basic are currently in strong competition with each other. A recent review shows that jobs ComputerJobs.Com that require Java, Visual Basic and C + +, the distribution is 55%, 35% and 10%. With VS.Net / VB. Net, SOAP, and the freedom to choose the platform independent language, you can expect this arrangement to move from Java to the non-Java languages. In fact, with VS. Net hosting about 20 different programming languages ??(including Java implementation of Rational) and compiling a common byte-code level, personal preference surely the agenda.