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Advantages Of .NET Over Java

Posted by timothy on from the easier-to-spell dept.

ansonyumo writes "ZDNet is carrying an article written by one John Carroll that outlines specific advantages of .NET over Java. It's written from the point of view of a Java advocate who has 'seen the light.' First of all, comparing .NET and Java isn't very fair; you have to compare .NET and J2EE. When you level the playing field, most of his arguments readily fall apart."

3 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Lets break this down... by Dr.+Bent · · Score: 4, Interesting
    So, according to this guy, the advantages are:
    1. XML property files
    2. Better reflection support
    3. No individual class files, only improved class bundles called "Assemblies" (this is a good thing)?!?
    4. ".Net Remoting" - basically RMI with support for any .NET language

    First off, I have to give him some credit. This is the first time I've ever seen a specific breakdown of exactly what .NET is good at that Java isn't. And he's right, these things are pretty cool (except maybe for #3).

    But would I trade J2EE for this? Not on your life. All of this stuff can be done in one way or another with Java, and Java is still way more mature in most respects. I mean, I'm assuming that since he chose to highlight these features, they're probably the most significant, and if this is the best that .NET has to offer over Java, the choice is clear for me.

    If I was going to develop a new Windows app, I'd be doing it in .NET, no question. But when it comes to cross-platform or enterprise level development, .NET is not ready for prime time.
  2. .NET *is* better -- but so what? by fm6 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The meaningful comparisons I've seen come out in .NET's favor. The .NET VM is rather more robust. The libraries are more carefully thought out. (Can anyone consider AWT without nausea?) And C# is much more expressive than Java, without falling into the feature pit of C++.

    Still, I think .NET is going to be a disaster. Microsoft is trying to make it do too many things at once. To them, it's not just a new enterprise software platform. It's a fix for all the shortcomings of the NT API. It introduces all the new programming features they never tire of dreaming up. And it does all this while retaining support for legacy languages, such as C++. AND .NET is supposed to maintain an easy migration path for Java programmers -- one that will make it impossible for them not to switch.

    It just won't fly. They're trying to do too much, and they're making the same mistakes they made with NT and Win16. And even if they went at it right, .NET could never hope to make more than modest inroads into the Java marketplace. Too much investment in an established technology. (Microsoft ought to know better, given the way they've benefited from that same principle.) The best they can really hope for is to find a niche where .NET excels, such as Web Services. This would parallel the career of other technologies (Cobol, PL/1, SQL, and of course Java itself) that were supposed to take over the world, and ended up just finding their own place in it.

  3. Re:Syntactic sugar by fm6 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I think you're really distorting the SS debate and the role of Cobol and C in that debate.

    The big mistake with Cobol is not that its syntax is too complex. Most early languages had that problem. But in Cobol's case, they made the silly assumption that a language with a superficial resemblance to ordinary English is somehow easier to learn. Thus in Cobol you can write:

    DIVIDE TOTAL BY NUMBER GIVING PRO-RATA REMAINDER RESIDUE.
    The problem is that Cobol is not a subset of English, it just looks like one. Cobol uses ordinary human constructs, but doesn't save the human from having to learn any abstractions.

    Detractors of C are fond of calling it "high level assembly language". I think that mostly comes from the use in C of pointers, which seem much too similar to machine language memory pointers. Now it's true that C pointers are not as sophisticated or foolproof as object references (Java and most other OOP languages), but they're still more than memory values. Consider,

    BIGDUDEDATASTRUCTURE d[DSIZE];
    for (i := 0; i < DSIZE; i++) chompchompchomp(d[i]);
    If you translate that to assembly, you'll see a difference that's a lot more than syntactic sugar.

    The basic issue between C++ and Java is not SS, but general complexity. So Java leaves out default parameters, operator overloads, and multiple inheritance, some other stuff.