A COMPARISON OF THE SECURITY FEATURES OF .NET AND J2EE

Abstract

The advent of web services has provided many companies the interoperability between software components that allows them to communicate regardless of the different infrastructures they use. Today, Microsoft .NET and Sun J2EE are the only two basic frameworks most web services are being accomplished. Even though they are two architectures from different vendors, .NET and J2EE share a lot of commonalities in the generic features they have and the way they work. To date, many comparative studies had been carried out for the two approaches, but most of them are from the industrial sector and thus contain bias due to commercial factors. As such, this paper aims to bring forth an introductory review on .NET and J2EE purely from academic point of view. We draw comparison between .NET and J2EE, in particular to the security they provide to the web services that use them. We show that even though the basic security features of the two are fairly similar, there are variations in their actual implementations. In the concluding remarks, some weaknesses of both architectures are highlighted.