ECMA, an international standards organization, has ratified as standards Microsoft's Java-like C# programming language and Microsoft .NET Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) technology. Microsoft hopes that by standardizing key parts of .NET, it can usurp Java as the platform of choice for Web-enabled application and service development. The ECMA ratification comes a year after Microsoft submitted the technologies as a jab of sorts at Sun Microsystems, which makes Java and has thus far refused to submit that language to a standards body.