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Java v. .Net?

Posted by timothy on from the yards'-worth-of-hedging dept.

JEmLAC writes: "Fawcette's running an interesting piece (in conjuction with JavaOne) on a presentation by Gartner analyst Mark Driver concerning the emerging niches for Java/J2EE and .Net in the deployment of Web services. His take is that by 2005, they will be co-standards."

6 of 39 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Right now... by pmz · · Score: 3

    Another important question: Has anyone succeeded at using SOAP to crack a "web services" server?

    --
    Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
  2. Re:Right now... by Why+Should+I · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm currently in the middle of implementing a large scale, customized CRM system for a global company.

    They insisted on using MS technologies (server maintenace would be easier they said).

    So we decided to use .Net because we needed a system wide platform to build all the customisations on. I would rather have used a more mature technology (Enterprise Java anyone) but MS was insisted upon us.

    When I first started to get into .Net all the right ups and books about it got me excited. It really does bring everything you need to build a web application into one platform. The problem ...

    There are far too many cracks that things fall through. All the little nitty gritty things that you don't want to become intimately involved with when building an enterprise system, do exactly that, force you to get intimately involved with the low level stuff.

    If I wanted to do low level work I woulda used a custom built platform (combo of server scripting, php or asp, and my own server side binaries with all the funky stuff in it). But no, we chose to go .Net because it "did everything".

    Yeah it did everything alright, just not completely.

    For example, anyone tried printing the contents of a rich text box control? Why use a prepackage rich text box control if you have to right your own low level rtf parser to print? how furked up is that?

  3. .NET is overall a good thing. by mmusn · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Love to learn the bomb, and realize that .NET is overall actually a pretty good thing. First of all, it moves the Microsoft world away from Visual C++, and VB. This will result in Windows programmers that are used to working and thinking much more like the rest of the world. It will also result in Windows programs that are more reliable and easier to port to other platforms.

    The C# language and core libraries underlying .NET are also well-documented and standardized. This means that free and third party implementations are going to happen (in fact, Mono is almost there), and a lot of free code can move more easily between the Windows and non-Windows worlds than was possible before.

    And Sun needs the competition. The threat to their business from C#/.NET may finally get Sun to open up Java more. And it may get Sun to finally address some serious limitations of Java and the JVM that they have been promising to address for years but failed to do anything about.

    In the long run, I think the two platforms will just merge. Runtimes will simultaneously support JVM and CLR, and Java and C# compilers will target each others runtimes.

    All this is good as far as I'm concerned. I'm using Java for a lot of my work right now, but I may give Mono a try once it is fully self-hosting on Linux.

  4. Re:Right now... by bigmouth_strikes · · Score: 3, Insightful

    AC, since you seem to have real life experience with .NET, it would be interesting to get more specific information.

    My thoughts on your post:

    1) Java runs fine on the same HW as .NET, plus you can get alot of the software for it for free. Running on Unix boxes is just a way to scale up Java, something that is not available for .NET.

    2) Same for Java.

    3) Performance is often better for asp, what are your specific applications and platforms ?

    4) Examples ?

    5) Java has this too. Nice infrastructure that is.

    6) What do you mean by data access layer ? Java is excellent for data access.

    7) Java too.

    8) Most java tools have this too.

    --
    Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
  5. Re:Pipe Dream by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Ah, but you fail to see how much faster it is to deploy SOAP based web services than CORBA/IIOP.

    If you are averse to .NET or develop on a non-Windows platform, why not give Systinet's WASP web services a try (http://www.systinet.com)? The Lite version is free even for commercial use, and the C++ implementation is open-source. It automagically generates all the stub code for you from Java skeleton classes.

    Go ahead and follow their hello world example, and time how long it takes you. Then go do it in CORBA and ONC/RPC. :)

    The whole point of Web Services is true interoperability and abstraction of the transport, while still giving you the means to tweak the transport as necessary for your distributed apps.

    It is much bigger than Microsoft, and much more than hype. WS hype is like XML hype. Yes XML is useful, though the hype can cloud judgement over what to use it for and what it will do.

    Nuff said, web services rock. BTW WASP works great with .NET! (And they're not paying me for this post...)

    esac

  6. Re:.NET not smacking Sun hard enough. Bummer by keysor · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Sun is going to have to come to their senses about this relatively soon. Resting on their laurels while MS funds a massive marketing strategy could end up crushing Java-- remember that almost everything MS is touting about .NET has already been in Java for a long time, but they're not treating it as a "better Java", but as something completely new. (Those tricky thieves...)

    The article suggests that Sun should focus on training more developers. As a student raised on Java, I think they're already in a good position here, but MS is currently on a push to get .NET taught at many of the elite universities as well. Doing some things better than Java (with a decade of hindsight) gives them an edge here...

    Now's a perfect time for Sun to reinvent Java a bit. Things like generics and the tail call optimization, for the researchers, but more importantly, a general push to the public again. Face it, there wasn't much fanfare when Java 1.4 was released. It's time to get excited about it again, is Java is going to hold out...