Slashdot Mirror
Advantages Of .NET Over Java
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."
when you compare to the correct language structure, so what? What's important is PHB's will probably be reading articles like that, and will point to said articles in justifying going with a microsoft centric language (along with IEEE, ECMA standardization, etc.) The article simply underscores that a wide and varied skillset is what's going to keep a developer alive in today's environment. Sun's not exhibiting the best of business decisions lately, and if they want to stay afloat, they need to come up with someone to answer .Net effectively in popular media. Posting articles on slashdot saying "look at this! it's not accurate!" isn't a great way to promulgate usage of your favorite language either...
First off, I have to give him some credit. This is the first time I've ever seen a specific breakdown of exactly what
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
If I was going to develop a new Windows app, I'd be doing it in
I don't do a lick of Java or
It's only available for x86 computers that run Windows.
No mainframe support.
No cluster support.
No Solaris,Unix,*BSD,OS/2, Win95, Mac 9, Mac X, AIX, IRIX support.
No Aplha, SPARC, PowerPC, Motoroal 68xxx suport.
So sure,
* parts of the
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
A lot of this is basically a load of crap. Plenty of people use XML for configuration issues. I personally still use text for most of my config files, just because it requires simpler and easier code.
And all of the default configuration files in J2EE ARE xml. web.xml,ejb-jar.xml, whatever.
Also, what's so great about having your "system wide " xml parser? In my world, you specifically don't create environment variables for your XML jar's because that makes it a common resource and creates conflicts. What if you want to use a different parser and both parsers have a class called XMLParser? How does MS deal with knowledge of which is which. J2EE servers (for the most part) simply provide application level resources (WEB-INF/lib and WEB-INF/classes) and server-level resources (app-server/lib).
Next: Metadata: XDoclet provides this ability and a lot of people use it. More importantly, it's not tied. You can use your own system.
Next: I honestly don't know enough about assemblies, but it does look like there are some cool things in there. I have to admit, CLASSPATH for Java can be clunky. However, JAR/EAR/WAR is pretty good stuff, and does most of what people need.
Next: The remoting issue is a non-starter. The protocol is really up to the vendor, and some vendors provide proprietary, somy RMI/JRMP, some strict RMI-IIOP. SOAP also changes some of this (no advatages to either side).
So blah, for the most part.
--Stupidity is Self Curing!
I don't necessarily agree with the article itself in some points, but I can't see how the comparison is "unfair" because it's not being made to J2EE but the Java 'platform' (Sun's words, not mine) itself. C# vs. Java would be a completely different thing, but that would be based on the features of the language and the runtime library. J2EE is just an extension of that.
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.
I've used Java longer than the reviewer -- since it was an alpha. I still use it and am an official participant in the JCP. I plan to continue using Java, probably for years to come.
.Net, though .Net's have the benefit of learning from Java's mistakes. (A nice, consistent way of converting between fundamental data types, well-designed containers, etc.)
.Net classes) have over Java. All the anti-MS bigots don't make that easy, though.
That being said, I find the C# language to be significantly better designed than the Java language. Things like delegates are a great improvement over interfaces. When Anders Hejlsberg was still at Borland, he tried to persuade Sun to use them in Java instead of the interface approach and they just blew him off. "Syntactic sugar" they called it, and then they went ahead and implemented their own syntactic vinegar. I'll take the sugar, thank you.
Using "properties" in an OO language is a natural.
a.b.c++ calls a set() method instead of directly accessing a member var named c. (The c property may not even be backed by a variable. It may be calculated on demand.) In Java, to use OO methods instead of exposing private variables, you would do something like
a.getB().setC(a.getB().getC()+1);
although usually it would be broken into several simpler steps with temp variables for ease of reading.
C# makes it a breeze to create visual interfaces to object properties without losing the encapsulation of the implementation of those properties.
There are so many other improvements in C# relative to Java that it really annoys me to hear the political refrain "C# is just a knock off of Java". It's such a superior "knockoff" that, for the first time in years, Sun has gotten back in the mode of making language improvements (all of which make it more like the "knockoff") instead of their knee-jerk "you're not language designers so, trust us, you don't need that" reaction of the past.
The Java class libraries are far more complete than those of
I now find myself in the position of using C# when I can (mostly for personal utilities) and Java when I must (for professional production). Since I strongly prefer to use Linux servers and strongly prefer to avoid the MS license ball-and-chain, I anticipate having to continue using Java for years.
While doing so, though, I will continue rooting for Mono and working thru the JCP to try to steer the Java language to embrace and extend what I consider the significant advantages C# (and to some extent the
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Not long after the Cobol disaster (too many syntactic niceties), the programming language community swung the other way and since the 1970s has opposed most niceties in a language as "syntactic sugar". Sure enough, the C code:
x = y + z;
is nothing but the syntactic sugared version of
LDA Y
ADD Z
MV X
SO?? Isn't the C version far superior nonetheless?
Yes, of course they will. You read Slashdot, so while you may not necessarily USE competing systems (Java or open source OS's), you're undoubtedly aware of them, and that Microsoft doesn't always make the best software or decisions.
.NET hype, and not without reason... .NET may not be the savior of the software world, but it IS a heckuva lot better than the old method of MFC or Win32 development. By far.
.NET will succeed, at least partially. You don't notice any problems with performance or security or service if you've never used an alternative (and be honest, many of the alternatives aren't that hot either).
I work for a company that works solely on Windows software, and I can tell you, our system designers don't have the benefit of such knowledge. They are totally buying in to the
Our designers are not stupid; they just seem incapable of thinking outside the Windows world. You don't know what "mindshare" means until you've seen this in action... Microsoft products have a total lock on their way of thinking. They just won't consider any alternatives, they use Microsoft stuff, and they LIKE it. A friend and I are gradually introducing open source stuff (an internal web app I wrote uses PHP and MySQL as opposed to ASP/SQL Server... and I had to fight for it!) but mostly, Microsoft is ALL THERE IS to them. That's why
Unrelated rant... after all these years, why do people still think it's cool to refer to Microsoft as M$? I'm not defending Microsoft software or business practices, but come on. That's just childish. It's not like you're going to gain any real karma or respect by doing that, and it's not like you can't find enough to be mad at Microsoft about without resorting to petty name calling. It's not even original anymore.
Hi... I'm Larry... the shivering chipmunk... brrrrr!... I'm cold... I need a sweater...
I understand the aversion the Java designers felt for "syntactic sugar". They equated it with the spiral of Perl into syntactic chaos.
.Net runtime made a lot more effort to include features in the bytecode system that will enable languages to use generics, multiple dispatch, multiple inheritance, tail calls, and others, which could support more interesting languages (or new C# features) in the future than may be practical with the JVM. (I'm not an expert on that last point, so consider it a *rumor*).
I understand it, but don't accept it. I think that the best programming language is the one that makes you tell the computer the fewest number of things to get it to do exactly what you want it to do.
I think the Java designers were way too conservative about syntax and way too conservative about incorporating popular, proven features from other languages. They should have had smarter enums than C++, not no enums. Smarter function pointers than C++ (delegates, for example) instead of no way to pass a single function as an argument, etc.
And more syntactic sugar of the sort you see in Python and Ruby.
Java is a very solid, valuable production platform as it is, but I think Java would be a better *language* if it were a little more like Python and less like a simplified C++.
Of course, I could say the same about C#, which obviously didn't want to venture too far from the familiar features of Java, C++, and VB. My understanding, though, is that the designers of the underlying
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."