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."

Comments

Red Queen race

[iangoldby]

causing Java to become stagnant

Why would we not want a language to be stagnant? I wonder how much time is wasted just trying to keep up with changes to languages and development environments?

Re:Java vs. .Net

[bladernr]

I wouldn't say that .Net will never take off. Microsoft has access to senior executives in large corporations; I know that shouldn't make a difference, but it does. I am consulting at a major communications company now, and I just got a call from a VP an hour ago saying "Take a look at Microsoft for the stuff you are doing." It seems MS paid him a visit, and they are pitching lots of .Net/XP stuff against our existing HP SuperDome environments.

Think of this another way: What if .Net was designed by a single person in their garage, would it get the attention it does? Of course not. Dot Net is a real threat to Java simply because it comes from Microsoft (a mega-corp with plenty of access).

You may not like it (I know I don't), but that is the nature of things.

Java is dying, news at 11

[FeloniousPunk]

Sounds like more MS FUD to me. So how many times has Java been declared dead/ dying now?
Where I work (for a DoD agency) we are developing J2EE solutions with open source tools in part to get away from vendor lock in, something that MS is particularly bad with. Once MS ratchets up the lock in with the introduction of DRM in Office file formats, I think MS solutions as a whole are going to become less attractive, and this will be a strong disincentive to adopt .NET.

Re:Industry Newspeak

[stratjakt]

Carpenters don't buy from hammer companies that change their hammers every "release".

Sure they do, there's been a lot of innovation going into hammers lately. They release new versions of hammers constantly, and other woodworking tools - to many oldtimers dismay, who will swear up and down the hand plane they used in 1952 was an order of magnitude better than todays.

Stanleys Anti-vibe series of hammers, for instance, they have whats basically a tuning fork built into the handle. The fork vibrates and takes the energy away from your hand. Spend a day ramming nails in with a wooden handled hammer, then a day with one of the newer models, and you definately feel the difference.

They're also constantly adjusting the weights and balances, tweaking the shape and makeup of the heads/claws.

Go look at the tool section at home depot and get an idea about hammers.

What about Java on other platforms.....

[smd4985]

such as cell phones (J2ME) and Linux? From what I understand MS has no presence on cell phones (and there are a lot more cell phones than desktops) and they'll do their best to avoid needing to have a presence on Linux (i.e. bribe a down-and-out company to try and take out Linux in the courts).

I think Sun has done a great job promoting Java on a variety of platforms, so I think McNealy isn't concerned about .NOT.

Re:VS sucks

[dasmegabyte]

What the fuck are you smoking?

There are some good Java IDEs, no doubt, but none of them can touch Visual Studio for, well, any single thing you could possibly want to do with an IDE. From designing interfaces, to writing code, to generating code, to debugging code, to remote debugging, it's just awesome and completely customizable.

Maybe you just picked it up, said "Oh Microsoft, must be junk." You were wrong to do so; it's way better than VS 6. Maybe you saw the animated docking and said "Too pretty, must be junk." You're wrong again...that's the first thing I take out, but by and large it's not a whistles and bells IDE. Maybe you saw all the icons and thought, "Too visual, must be junk." You'd be wrong...everything you want to do in Studio.Net can be done without ever touching the designer, and in fact I don't have a single icon bar turned on in my IDE.

Compared to Sun's IDE, the awesome in its own right open source Netbeans, VS is much faster for compilation, has more accurate and immediate response from controls and object generation is more reliable. The tools are for the most part simpler while at the same time being more complete. They are easier to use and you can mess with the generated code without destroying the associated resources (for the most part). VS.NET doesn't have as robust a feature set as some Java IDEs, but it's got plenty and it all works.

Re:It's obvious

[molarmass192]

Sun's not a monopoly and don't make it sound like MS gave the entire .NET framework to the ECMA. Nope, just the C# langauge and the CLI, this would be like Sun turning over javac and java to the ECMA but keeping a grip on anything beyond Java primitives, it's a bullshit token PR jesture. The JCP is a far more public process for directing Java than anything we'll ever see from MS for .NET.

Re:Java vs. .Net

[jimfrost]

After all, it hasn't during the 3 years its been out.

Technically .NET wasn't released until a year ago last spring. It's only been out about 18 months. Last fall it was clear that people using .NET were very early adopters, but uptake seems very strong.

To be honest, Java on embedded devices doesn't seem like that big a win to me at the moment, no matter how many cellphones they're trying to ship with it. Most Java in use is on the server side. And that is a big differentiator between Java and .NET: Java runs on pretty much any hardware you care to throw at it, which means you can scale your server from that itty-bitty Pentium box up to the biggest stuff Sun sells. With Windows you've got midrange Intel boxes and ... midrange Intel boxes. Little per-box scalability, and that means that large systems are going to be a pain to manage - particularly given how hard it is to manage Windows servers in bulk.

I can see .NET being useful for small servers that need to be put together quickly and cheaply; VS.NET is great for that. But it's not really there yet for big systems, both in terms of framework maturity and OS scalability and stability.

Mostly I think we'll see .NET be used in building GUI applications in the near term. Let there be no mistake, it is phenomenal at that.

Interview with Anders Hejlsberg

[hackrobat]

Earlier this week, artima.com published an interview with Anders Hejlsberg, lead architect of the C# programming language. Hejlsberg, interviewed by Bruce Eckel and Bill Venners, talks about the C# design process, the trouble with checked exceptions, and his idea of simplexity .

C# is one programming language I've stayed away from--and for no particular reason. I had picked up the C# specification [PDF] in 2000, but never really got down to the canonical "hello world" program. Today in 2003, as I look back, I guess I haven't missed much.

Let's go back to August 2000 and revisit Hejlsberg's famous O'Reilly interview by Josh Osborn.

Why are there no enums in Java, for example? I mean, what's the rationale for cutting those?

And Java has enums now, just like they come in C#.

one of our key design goals was to make the C# language component-oriented

I think this was really nice, and fitted in well with Microsoft's COM framework. I remember COM enthusiasts mentioning how every C# object would automatically be a COM object, thereby eliminating all that old school drudgery.

C# is the first language to incorporate XML comment tags that can be used by the compiler to generate readable documentation directly from source code.

Python and Java have docstrings (or javadoc) as part of the language.

Developers are building software components these days. They're not building monolithic applications or monolithic class libraries.

Developers are building all sorts of stuff, and not just "components". I think that statement is overrated.

Boxing allows the value of any value type to be converted to an object, while unboxing allows the value of an object to be converted to a simple value type.

Thanks, now Java has it too!

Unsafe code allows you to write inline C code with pointers, to do unsafe casts, and to pin down memory so it won't accidentally be garbage-collected. [...] The real difference is that it's still running within the managed space. The methods you write still have descriptive tables that tell you which objects are live, so you don't have to go across a marshalling boundary whenever you go into this code. Otherwise, when you go out to undescriptive, unmanaged code (like through the Java Native Interface, for example), you have to set a watermark or erect a barrier on the stack.

Honestly, I didn't understand the stuff about "unsafe code", the implementation of IL, and the implementation of generics. Just for comparison sake, Python also has a scheme for inlining C and C++ code.

Let's face it, some people like to program in COBOL, some people like to program in Basic, some like C++, and some will like C#, I hope. But we're not trying to tell you to forget everything you ever did.

I've raised this point to Java bigots on several occasions. It's just too difficult (and sometimes impossible) to interface Java with other languages. (In this context,

Re:Shoehorn

[Fnord]

I'll agree with client side stuff, but I've been in a situation in the past where we developed a server size web app (in J2EE) on a single nt4 server (purely for ease of access). Then when we went gold, capacity grew and it moved to a cluster of linux servers. Then when the business picked up and capacity grew in large amounts we moved to a couple Sun E6500s. .NET wouldn't have allowed us to migrate like this.

Re:Isn't that pining for the fjords? Anyway...

[ADRA]

Just to clearify, I am a low level hacker with C on the brains. I am not a bread and butter VB guy. If I wanted to make a quick and dirty GUI though, I could use VB 6 because my company owns it but more importantly, there was no complexity at all. Almost half the things I did were in the realm setting property X to value Y. Simple, quick, done.

VB is not as much a programming language that became a GUI, but a prototyping tool that became a programming language. The move to VB.NET has taken away all the language simplicity making it a fully fledged language, but made it difficult enough to negate its benefits over other products that fall within its same niche. I do my quick and dirty GUI's in Jbuilder now. If I have to use a fully fledged language, I would rather use a portable one.

Re:Not up to the developers...

[AstroDrabb]

This isn't always true. I am a developer for a fortune 500 company and we just finished a huge Java vs .Net comparison. The company brought in a lot of outside opinions and had us devlopers give opinions as well. Of course an MS rep was there telling the tall tales to all the PHB's of how .Net would make us 10x more productive and save us millions (just like the commercials), though the figures did not include all upgrade costs for Win2003 Server and WinXP cost. When it was all said and done, just about everyone picked Java, except for the MS rep and a few VB/ASP only type guys who don't have the technical ability to program much more then a few asp pages. It all came down to Java is proven to be stable and secure. MS and their technologies have not and especially .Net. We also have many mission critical apps that just cannot be trusted on an MS platform so they run mostly on Solaris and now some Linux boxen are popping up. Java gives us the ability to choose the right tool for the right job. .Net would have locked us in to just MS and severly limited choices. Once we as developers got that point across to the PHB's, they were able to see the light.