Public Standards: C# 2, Java 0

TheAncientHacker writes "While Java coders wait for SUN to be willing to accept any public standards for the Java language and runtime, Microsoft's C# and its underlying CLI, already standardized by ECMA, are about to get a second certification. This time by by the granddaddy of certification groups, the ISO."

Comments

What's up Sun??!!

[ChaoticChaos]

I love Java and earn a living coding J2EE systems, but Sun's posture on not creating a public standard for Java is just ridiculous.

It immediately creates the notion that Java is a proprietary language.

Hard to believe that Microsoft's new language has two public standards and Sun's language has none. Is something wrong with this picture? Microsoft is starting to appear as a reasonable and responsible company and Sun appears as stumbling around in the dark.

Re:What's up Sun??!!

[robbyjo]

Hard to believe that Microsoft's new language has two public standards and Sun's language has none. Is something wrong with this picture? Microsoft is starting to appear as a reasonable and responsible company and Sun appears as stumbling around in the dark.

Well, it's all about control. Sun fears that once it place the language into standard bodies, it loses the control over the language. Whereas, as you may notice, there are lots of other language features need to be implemented. One of them is genericity / templates -- that is due out for Java 1.5. If Sun put Java into standard, it cannot make the modification easily.

Moreover, Sun also fears of dominant groups (read: Microsoft) may overwhelm or sway the language away from their original intents.

Re:What's up Sun??!!

[Jord]

There are multiple free implementations of Java. Have been for years. Sun could attempt to stop providing a JVM but that would not stop the community. In fact Sun's implementation of the JVM is one of the slower versions out there.

Java may appear to be proprietary to the non-informed but the programmers know better.

Re:What's up Sun??!!

[be-fan]

Eh. Microsoft's new language is about as "standard" as C++ without the Standard Library. It's a castrated version of a real language. Further, C# _as_a_language_ isn't anything special. It's a cut-down version of C++ with native support for properties and delegation. The whole point of Java and .NET aren't the C# and Java languages, but the huge class libraries. Until those are standardized, ISO C# doesn't mean much.

Re:What's up Sun??!!

[Richard W.M. Jones]

You've obviously not tried to use Kaffe for any serious work.

Blackdown is a port of Sun's JVM.

You might have mentioned IBM's JVM, but that's just as proprietary as Sun's.

Remember that the JVM includes libraries, and without a complete set of working, compatible, debugged libraries your Java development is basically fscked.

Rich.

Re:What's up Sun??!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well the thing is, most of MS's "evil" is because they are big. Any small evil thing they do is blown up huge by the huge impact it has. And especially here by the just plain outright hatred that emasses here.

In fact I find that Sun and Apple are frequently quite a bit MORE evil if you remove the entire market share from the equation and look at their actions more philosophically.

Relentless pursuit of fans, maniacal leaders that spew verbal FUD at every oppourtunity, closing down the clone markets, faking JRE test software to make your 4x slower JRE seem as good as the competitions, selectively applying JRE compatibility rules to various friends/competitors and on and on.

As far as Sun stumbling in the dark, that have done that for JAVA since day one. The early development tools were practically non-existant. And until recently, installing their JRE on Windows required the user to hand edit their environment to add a path to the JRE to it to make it work, even from the windows GUI. How much harder could they make it on themselves and their customers? I always thought that they blew it with their incredable poor dev. environment for JAVA. Compared to developing VB or VC++ on windows it was like using rocks and sticks. UNIX programmers were right at home with the sytem as it of course mimicked typical UNIX development (No suprise, they're SUN!)

Though MS took advantage of JAVA in ways they probably shouldn't have, Windows developers people were starving for good JAVA tools on Windows and MS stepped up to the plate while Sun didn't. If Sun had provided a Visual Studio type dev environment from day one for all three platforms I believe a HUGE army of Windows developers would have jumped on it and Sun's JAVA would have taken off strong, instead it limped then and it still limps today.

I am particularly perterbed by Sun's lack of support (or rather lack of EXTREME support) for Java as it is my daily duty at work to find usable cross platform tools for our software dev. needs and though we have actually used some JAVA with some success, it has been a lot more dissapointing as a dev. environment and as a platform than it should be.

Re:What's up Sun??!!

[MSG]

Blackdown isn't a free implementation, it's a port of Sun's JVM to Linux. It bears the same license.

Re:What's up Sun??!!

[miguel]

Those particular components that you mention (Type) are part of the ECMA and ISO standard efforts.

So in fact the submission covers C#, a set of base class libraries and a potential execution environment (you can compile to native code if you choose instead)

Miguel

oh well

[AssFace]

I guess I'll just stop coding in it.

that's too bad really - I liked java.

seriously - why should we care? does the code allow me to do what I want? yes.
and done - I don't care about no stinking standards evaluation.

Re:If we're keeping score

[ergo98]

Most Microsoft shops have or will switch to .NET (it's a natural progression), and of course Microsoft shops comprise the majority of "shops" out there. Indeed the most telling evidence of .NETs stunning market presence can be seen at your local bookshop: Already there are probably 2x the number of .NET books than there are Java books (seriously, go take a look).

Platforms C# works on

[AlgUSF]

Platforms for C#: 0 Windows .NET is still .NOT
Platforms for Java: Windows, Solaris, Linux, AIX, Irix, Tru64, ........


At my university:
Classes tought with C#: 0
Classes tought with Java: 6

Re:Platforms C# works on

[stratjakt]

Spoken like a MS hater who isn't familiar with the products.

The .NET framework has been available for Win 2k and XP for some time, and VS.net has been advertised right here on slashdot forever. .NET server was renamed Windows 2003 because it was confusing people like you.

A language is not an operating system. Saying .NET only works on Win 2003 is like saying Java only works on Solaris.

Re:Platforms C# works on

[Arthur Dent]

At my university:
Classes tought with C#: 0
Classes tought with Java: 6

Class taught in Spelling: Priceless.
For all else, there's m-w

Re:Standards?

[LanikMueller]

Ever heard of Mono? Ever heard of Apache.Net? You need to do some more homework....MS only implemented .Net on their platform, but other groups are doing so on other platforms.

This is somewhat of a smoke screen..

[elemur]

My understanding is that MS is bringing some components to the standards orgs so they can say that, but that their environment will still heavily leverage internal and private APIs.

So, you have to differentiate between a baseline CLR environment, and the actual programming APIs that would be used to build on top of this. .NET is not the CLR.. .NET is the CLR, APIs, Libraries, and so forth.. therefore only a small part of the environment is open.

Who wants to bet that this is more for marketing than it is for getting cross platform capabilities? Without MS opening all libraries and APIs *AND* approving any patent use they have on those components to other systems, a public standard on CLR means nothing.

Sun should bring Java to a standards org, but at the same time, its well documented, understood, and there are no hidden parts to the JVM/Runtime. You aren't going to see that with .NET.

Re:This is somewhat of a smoke screen..

[elemur]

Just because they have a stronger commitment to XML doesn't make it any more open, when considered as an enterprise platform.

Take a look at InfoNotes and some of the Office 2003 components. They *fully require* much of your enterprise to be deployed on Microsoft software. They actively spurned W3 standards such as XForms for their own form standard in this line as well.

This sort of thing isn't new.. and the push to drag the enterprise architecture along by the client applications is dangerous. The DRM technologies being built in for document protection at a concept level are good.. but again, no openness and public standards there.

My feel is there is a variety of token gestures to give people warm fuzzies, even as the noose tightens and the enterprise and client architecture looses the possiblity to be *anything but* their platform.

Who cares about an XML file format if you can't decrypt it without Microsoft? What good is a CLR if you can't do anything without patented libraries whose distribution rights are limited to the Windows platform?

Re:This is somewhat of a smoke screen..

[Caoch93]

So, you have to differentiate between a baseline CLR environment, and the actual programming APIs that would be used to build on top of this. .NET is not the CLR.. .NET is the CLR, APIs, Libraries, and so forth.. therefore only a small part of the environment is open.

Agreed. MS is hiding several parts of .NET, providing an open standard only for a handful of low level components. I have ECMA standard 335 (or is it 355), the standard for CLI and CLR, and it really doesn't cover much at all.

It certainly doesn't cover WinForms, so good luck seeing portability for GUI applications written in VS.NET!

Open standards are nice, but played the right way, are bullocks. In this case, Microsoft has decided to include all sorts of references and links to non-standard APIs and libraries, and they are under no obligation to release them. I have reason to suspect, too, that a third party who replicates the behavior of something like WinForms in their own .NET implementation (without MS permission) would find themselves on the business end of charges of reverse-engineering.

Of course, this can make for a delicious "Tower of Babel" situation as other parties (Mono, etc) start creating their own APIs to fill in the gap between the ECMA standard and what's needed to get things done. The only difference is that the Mono libraries for their APIs will probably be available for a Windows port (if they're not 100% MSIL code already), whereas MS' APIs won't be.

Re:Nice to say patented standards

[Mendax Veritas]

you can get a pig and put lipstick, makeup, eyeshadow, and a thong on it and call it Britney Spears but its still a pig.

That, however, is a distinction without a difference.

Just like POSIX compatibility for Windows NT

[ink]

Microsoft did the same thing back in the early nineties. They added a "POSIX compatibility layer" to Windows NT and then went around getting gullable (ahem) reporters to praise their new Standards Compliant(tm) operating system. We all know the end result of that; Cygwin even had to go back to the drawing board to get any common POSIX application to compile for NT.

Meanwhile, Linux isn't "officially" UNIX or even POSIX-certified; and yet it's still much more POSIXish than Windows NT is. The same is true for dotNet vs. Java/J2EE; the one has lip service from standards bodies while the other is more-or-less fully open.

Re:Just like POSIX compatibility for Windows NT

[Billly Gates]

Actually Microsoft did this not to run Unix apps but to get government contracts which require posix compliance. Microsoft made sure it was crippled in return so they would migrate to win32 after it became apparent that the posix layer was broken.

Try Java 922, C# 2....

[SuperKendall]

Hey, have a look over at JCP.org.

There's 922 JSR's there, all public standards underway that anyone (that includes YOU and ME) can comment on. Where can I go to comment on the C# standards underway?

So, which is the more open standard?

What a maroon. (Yes, I did spell that right).

Forgot to mention those are patent free...

[SuperKendall]

Also, anyone submitting a standard to the JCP relinquishes patents on any parts of the standard.

Not that Microsoft would do anything funny with Patents and .Net!! No Sir!!

Wasn't April 1st yesterday?