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Oracle and Sun Team Up to Provide .NET Alternative
segphault writes "Ars Technica has an article about the new partnership between Sun and Oracle, designed to provide an alternative to .NET." From the article: "According to Ellison and McNealy, their mutual goal is the production of a complete Java-centric enterprise datacenter architecture that leverages Solaris 10 and Oracle's Fusion middleware. Designed specifically as an alternative to Microsoft's .NET technology stack, the new platform is competitively priced and based on robust frameworks."
> OTOH, only a small part of .NET has been proposed to the ECMA,
> which is not even a standard organization. Mono provides only a
> small subset of .NET.
ECMA is the organization that standardized Javascript, and is the organization that Firefox looks to for that standard. I'm not sure what else you have to do to be a "standards organization".
Technicalities aside, why does this matter? Python is not a standardized language; nor is Ruby a standardized language. Yet both are mentioned on this site daily and are being used widely in production. With C# and .NET, you have the future direction of the #1 software company in the world. You have the adopted language and framework of a very large number of Fortune 500 companies and Wall Street firms.
Microsoft/.NET is the new version of "you can't get fired by going with IBM," and IT'S ACTUALLY GOOD. That's the part that terrifies Oracle and Sun. In contrast, Java is a terribly disorganized. Developers rely on tons of third party tools to get anything done. The development environments aren't very good compared to VS 2005 (Eclipse, Netbeans -- though much improved with 5.0 -- fall flat in comparison).
Bottom line is, if anyone really worries about .NET not being standardized, they're not in the .NET target market anyway, and they're not part of what Sun and Oracle are at all worried about.
Good luck to Sun and Oracle, they slacked off on Java to the point where they have a long hard road ahead of them. ASP.NET/C#/CLR 2.0 and VS 2005 are awesome.
The battle never ended. You just got used to the sound of the cannons.
.NET is a *direct* response to Java. And Microsoft took the time to do it right, which has a sinigifcant possibility of killing off new Java development in the long run. .NET is light years ahead of Java in terms of ease of development -- which is what matters to people who are responsible for making money.
Microsoft was not trying to make Java proprietary; Microsoft was trying to make it integrate properly into Windows. If Sun had worked with them instead of against them, Java would probably be a very popular platform for desktop applications. Instead, it's gotten itself pidgeonholed on the server side.
Meanwhile, as a direct result of Sun's lack of cooperation, Microsoft decided to build their own wheel.
Technologies that work well on the desktop do tend to find their way onto the server. Just look at Windows for proof of that.
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