There is no ‘split’ between J2EE and .Net — the whole point of web services is to bridge the gap between the two. Tom Welsh explains why in a cogent opinion piece on The Register yesterday. I was amazed to hear recently from a leading manager at a big systems integrator that the biggest issue facing his firm’s clients was consolidation, as if putting everything on a single platform will solve everyone’s IT problems. Far better to concentrate on getting them to work in synch, I would have thought, and as Tom identifies, that’s the real objective of web services. So if .NET does one job well and J2EE does others better, then you can deploy the right platform to do each job without landing yourself with a horrendous integration headache.