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GCN Home > April 29, 2002 issue

OMB advocates J2EE, .Net for e-gov

By Jason Miller, GCN Staff

The Office of Management and Budget is recommending that the architects of the 24 e-government initiatives use Java 2 Enterprise Edition or Microsoft .Net as underlying technology.

The bottom line, OMB officials said, is that agencies need to use common sense when it comes to the technologies they select. Those technologies need to be open, reusable, interoperable, stable, portable and secure, said Debra Stouffer, OMB’s federal enterprise architecture program manager.

Stouffer, who is near the end of a 90-day detail at OMB from the Housing and Urban Development Department, said her office advocates the J2EE and .Net development frameworks because they mesh well with e-government project needs.

“These two are the only prominent ones that are relatively proven in industry,” she said.

“They offer the capabilities that we outlined in our requirements. They are open technologies with proven industry standards.”

Stouffer earlier this month detailed the component architecture and the business reference model at a luncheon in Washington sponsored by the Association for Federal Information Resources Managers.

The business reference model establishes the framework on which the component architecture can be built, Stouffer said. It outlines the business lines, or chief missions, each agency engages in and how each line relates to programs at other agencies.

Once the business reference was finished, OMB considered what technologies would make up the component architecture. Stouffer’s team rated J2EE and .Net on a 24-point scale that looked at how well they work with hardware and software that provide Web services, and File Transfer Protocol and e-mail services. J2EE received a higher rating in both application categories, earning 22 of 24 points for Web services.

J2EE got a higher rating than .Net for Web services because it can work with a wider range of operating systems and can more easily adopt new features, Stouffer said. It also outscored .Net for e-mail and FTP because of its maturity and OS independence.

More news on related topics: E-Government



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