Competing Microsoft and Java technologies will dominate ebusiness application development for the next five years, but larger businesses will have little option but to support both.

Mark Driver, research director for ebusiness technologies at Gartner, said Microsoft has failed in its first battle to kill Sun Microsystems' Java, but the war for control of the multi-billion dollar application development market is not over.

Companies have chosen Java because of its cross-platform support and because, according to Driver, "it has more wiggle room so that design problems can be overcome with sheer horsepower". This means only smaller companies can afford to consolidate on one or other technology.

Speaking at Gartner's autumn Symposium/ITxpo event in Florida, Driver said the real losers in this war are Cobol and 4GL languages, which are decreasing in importance as Java and Microsoft's .Net technologies evolve. However, he said the web services strategies exposed by both camps will ease integration over the next five years.

Driver said Microsoft's .Net web-focused technologies will greatly improve its offering within the next 12 to 18 months, but will not catch up with Java for at least four years.

"Microsoft's existing technology, Com [Component Object Model], has been stretched until it can't be stretched any more. .Net is a brand new rubber band with massive changes including a new runtime and API framework, and support for XML [eXtensible Markup Language]," said Driver, who added that Visual Basic programmers face a steep learning curve.

Driver predicts that Microsoft will not include support Java in its upcoming development toolset, Visual Studio.Net, but that its C# (pronounced C-sharp) technology will remain Microsoft-centric for at least two years.

More surprisingly, he said the development of .Net for Linux or Unix could follow if Microsoft's court fight with the US government resulted in the software giant being split into separate applications and operating system companies.

"A split would accelerate the shipping of a cross-platform version of .Net, because a future application company would see Linux as a opportunity - not a threat," said Driver.