Java and XML will coexist despite the ongoing battle of words between respective supporters Sun Microsystems and Microsoft, according to researcher Gartner.

David Smith, a research director at Gartner, said that while Java and XML have been used by the two vendors as weapons against each other, they are different technologies that can work side by side.

Microsoft is a leading supporter of XML. It also has a number of initiatives underway that are likely to undermine developer support for Sun's Java.

Speaking at Gartner's US Spring Symposium this week, Smith said: "Java and XML solve different problems and it is rare that you'll have to decide between the two. But they have been pitted against each other because they were caught in the battle between Sun and Microsoft."

"XML is an open standard and has received strong support from Microsoft because it's not Java," he said, adding that the software giant is promoting XML to divert interest from Sun's programming language.

But Microsoft also has some developments of its own which it hopes will sharpen its position as a provider of ebusiness development tools and stem the flow of programmers migrating to Java.

The most significant threat to Java is Microsoft's simple object access protocol (Soap) which is used to evoke business-to-business services and is used with XML, which describes transactions. Gartner predicts that 70 per cent of e-services will use Soap by 2003.

Microsoft has issued a draft specification of Soap to the Internet Engineering Taskforce, but Sun and IBM are likely to drag their feet in supporting the protocol and may back a similar technology from another developer, claimed Smith.

Microsoft also plans to drop support for the Java development toolkit in favour of its own 'clone' toolkit.

Cool, an object oriented version of C++, and IL, a universal virtual machine that runs multiple languages across processors, are two other developments from Microsoft which may not be released as products but could be embedded in other technologies.

The two technologies were originally created to protect Microsoft against Java at the height of the language's hype, but have so far failed to materialise as standalone products. Instead, IL will appear in Windows CE to enable the operating system to run across different processors, and Cool will be added to Visual Basic and Visual ++, said Smith.