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Java vs .NET
CHaN_316 writes "Yahoo is running a story called 'Is Java Finished?' It provides a brief overview of the strengths and weaknesses of J2EE and contrasts them with .NET. Classic arguments are brought up like Java being great for portability while .NET ties you down to Microsoft products, etc. It's interesting that they bring up the Java Community Process, and how it is a rather slow moving procedure that is causing Java to become stagnant."
I know you're trolling but, How is java related open sourced? I can not get the javac.exe source code.
Please follow along carefully:
1) Go to http://java.sun.com.
2) Click the button labelled "J2SE - Core Java Software". It's the big blue button in the middle.
3) On the next page, click "Source Licensing". It's in the links on the left-hand side of the page.
4) On the Source Licensing page, click "Download".
5) Follow the directions to download the entire J2SDK source code.
Now, what was that about the source code not being available?
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
You've got your runtimes mixed up.
The Dotnet runtime consists of approximately 1200 classes, including Windows Forms, ASP.NET etc.
The CLR/CLI standard only covers core language-related classes - approx 120 in all.
Dotnet is therefore mostly proprietary and there is no spec. to implement. Mono is having to reverse-engineer, with dubious consequences.
Java versus .NET is becoming a ubiquitous topic. It's been the subject of debate since .NET beta 1. Microsoft and Sun both have "independent" studies conducted to prove that their platform (J2EE/.NET) is better and both have convincing arguments. There is no perfect language or platform to solve every programming problem - sometimes it's C++, sometimes it's Python, sometimes it's something else - it really depends on the problem.
It's no secret that one reason Microsoft created C# is to compete directly with Java. It's pure ignorance to say that C# is proprietary and that you're locked-in to Windows. C# and the CLI (.NET) is an approved ECMA standard. This is something SUN was unwilling to do with Java. For this reason, in a sense, Java remains far more proprietary than C#. It's too early in C#'s life to say that it won't be ported to other platforms - look at Mono. There is a lot of FUD being disseminated about "Microsof is going to sue Ximian, et al. for Mono" blah,blah,blah. That's not going to happen. Microsoft has already released the source code to the CLI with one intention of "People developing their own CLI implementations will find the Shared Source CLI an indispensable guide and adjunct to the ECMA standards.". So, for the argument that C# and the CLI are proprietary and one is bound to Windows is just plain ridiculous.
Syntactically, C# and Java are extremely similar. They both derive from C++. Structurally, they are very similar as well. They are both OO languages, everything is a class, etc. Side-by-side they look very similar. There are numerous small details which make C# "friendlier" than Java, ie. C# has no requirement that the file be named after the class. However, C# has a lot of other advantages over Java. C# can make use of pointers. Java has no option on parameter passing - Objects are passed by reference, value types are passed by value. While C# has the same limit on objects, you are able to use pointers and it also supports boxing. C# supports operator overloading as well. On the merits of the languages alone, C# is stronger than Java. It should be expected since it was developed from scratch nearly 7 years after Java arrived.
As far as performance, Java leaves a lot to be desired. I won't belabor this issue. If you'd like a demonstration of the difference between the run-time execution of .NET vs Java, pick your favorite VM and run Forte, then run Visual Studio .NET (it's written in C#) and decide for yourself. Java run-time performance alone is enough to dissuade some developers.
Java does come as close to a RAD language as can be. Java applications can be developed quickly with far fewer bugs and errors as a comparable C/C++ application with the benefit of garbage collection as well. For this Java gets an "A". It greatly simplifies the process of rapidly developing database and other applications.
Is Java going away? Hardly. But like it or not, C# and the CLI are here to stay as well. It's only a matter of time before the CLI is ported to other platforms and environments just like the JVM.
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
My favorite tool for the integration is JuggerNET, which transparently starts up a JVM in the CLR process and the developer simply codes against generated .NET classes. I am affiliated with Codemesh, so I'm somewhat biased (take a look at Stu Halloway's great website for alternatives) but working with both platforms for a living, I just can't get excited about controversial this or that is dying statements. Both platforms have their strong and their weak points.
I love the platform portability of Java, but I think Java is too closed in terns of language integration. Doing JNI by hand is an abomination, and most people at Sun admit it.
I love the language portability of .NET (it's not perfect, but then, neither is Java's platform portability) but I hate the exception model.
So, there you have it. Neither will kill each other, they will just coexist uncomfortably until they both get replaced with something new.
Um, define bloated.
.NET 2003 IDE takes up 17 meg of disc space. With 20 projects open, and debugging it's eating 80 meg of memory. It uses 0 processor time in idle mode, less than 1% when typing, less than 20% when searching with regular expressions. It doesn't peg the CPU when compiling. Starting it up, and reading all of my files, takes 20 seconds. Starting a brand new project takes 3 or 4.
The
On this same machine, NetBeans takes over 70 meg of space, 180 meg of memory for only 10 classes, pegs the cpu if you stare at it hard enough, and it just slow as hell. Starting it can take close to a minute.
Please don't compare Studio 6, a piece of crap, and VB3, which is so old that it shits doilies, with a modern on-demand IDE liek Studio.NET. When I did Java, I used to use textpad for the bredth of my typing and editing because the IDE was so slow. Now I do it all in Studio. It's just better.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
#1) Java was NOT originally developed for embedded systems.
I think you might be mistaken here.
Before the language was called 'Java', it was called 'Oak'. It was a language for building embedded applications on smart consumer electronics. However, Oak was way ahead of its time in terms of product targeting.
I fear nobody has mentioned the simple yet profound fact that will drive many towards .NET & Java/J2EE. It's Linux! It's free, it's stable, it's secure (relative to MS OS's). Put it together with Apache Open Source products such as Tomcat & Apache httpd, or JBoss if you are into EJBs and you can't go wrong.
.NET and Java/J2EE more irrelevant than most will admit. They are both very well designed development languages, and can accomplish most projects in a similar amount of time, with similar numbers of developers.
.NET add-in dev libraries aren't available, they just aren't provided in an FREE manner as frequently as they are in the Java world.
I feel that the technical debate between
Just one problem, most businesses wish to make $$$, and if you haven't noticed the tech sector barely able to keep it's head above water right now. Thus, all things equal I'd bet most businesses will probably opt for a Java (or J2EE)/Linux solution as the overall price can't be beat, and you don't have to waste you development time creating valueless libraries that others must have had to create already. Not to say
Anyhow, my 2 cents.