5. Web services development and deployment tools and platforms

The state of the art at the start of 2002, i.e. very early in the economic cycle of Web services development and distribution, is that there are two basic technologies for the development and deployment of Web services and applications in the enterprise: the Java universe, formalized in the J2EE specification, and the Microsoft universe under the name .NET. J2EE and .NET are technologies originally conceived with the broader ambition of becoming general platforms for the development and deployment of enterprise applications, but which can be used, in the spirit of the times, to build and deploy Web services and applications. There is no immediate correspondence between the technologies present in J2EE and .NET: the construction and deployment of Web services implement this or that technique or mechanism provided by a J2EE or .NET implementation – and not necessarily all of their respective...