A Comparative Study of J2EE and Microsoft.NET - Architecture and Security of Enterprise Applications

Abstract

Today, an enterprise cannot survive without information technology to automate its business processes. E-business has given this automation another dimension.
In this thesis we define enterprise applications as multi tier, component based, distributed web applications. This architecture introduces a lot of low level implementation problems. As a solution to these problems we describe platforms with services and programming libraries specialized for the design of enterprise applications.
Firstly, we summarize the common concepts of those platforms, afterwards we compare two concrete platforms: J2EE and .NET. This comparison is illustrated by means of a case study. Afterwards we elaborate on role based access control, authentication and authorization in J2EE and .NET. This thesis is concluded with an extension to the .NET security architecture: PAM.NET introduces pluggable authentication modules into the .NET framework and integrates with the existing authorization technology of .NET.

Bert Lagaisse
may 15th, 2003