Microsoft: .Net Beat Java, Who's Next?
Linked by Eugenia Loli on Fri 28th Jul 2006 18:28 UTC
.NET (dotGNU too) Microsoft is leaving Java in the dust, but the company still has room to grow in the developer arena, a key executive said. Speaking at the Microsoft FAM (Financial Analyst Meeting) on July 27 in Redmond, Wash., Bob Muglia, Microsoft's senior vice president of Server and Tools business, said Microsoft's .Net platform has outpaced Java, particularly the Java Enterprise Edition, over the past five years to become the development platform of choice for enterprise development.
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RE: .NET in the enterprise??
by zambizzi on Sat 29th Jul 2006 06:15 UTC in reply to ".NET in the enterprise??"
zambizzi
Member since:
2006-04-23

I can relay a personal experience I had w/ .NET in the "enterprise" context - it was a complete disaster and eventually...a failure that was written off.

A very large, well-known software shop was hired by my company to build a supply-chain/order fulfillment/inventory application to manage their growing operations (going from multi-million to Billions annually.)

It was written over a period of six months and performed/scaled so poorly...and began to spiral out of control so quickly that the aforementioned software shop was fired abruptly due to pressure from upper-management to "do something". I was hired shortly thereafter and was able to stabilize the application overall over the next few months. However, the application failed to scale to an acceptable level after throwing more and more hardware at it and several re-writes of major components. It just could not handle more than a handful of users across the entire system. MSSQL Server 2000 was used and though the database design wasn't perfect by any means...it just could not help but crumble under the pressure of the application on top of it. The entire app was built w/ VS.NET 2003 using typed datasets in the "visual" environment. Once it was confirmed by myself (and a small group of consultants brought in to help) that it would need more than progressive "tweaking" to make it perform better - it was tossed in the trash a few months later - the users just couldn't take it anymore.

I've since re-written the critical parts needed by the sale staff using Java EE - we've had very few problems and are sleeping more at night now.

This is when we decided to switch to Java EE for our "enterprise" efforts going forward...it's proven, mature, and worth the investment. Java EE 5 is a huge leap forward and makes apps *simple and fun* to write...not drudgery (i.e. ADO.NET.)

Now, I've also written plenty of apps in .NET but nothing the size of this application I mentioned. The database had over 200 tables and several hundred stored procedures. It was architected well and there was no blatent ugliness about it (other than a complicated weave of boilerplate code to perform data-access since .NET has no concept of ORM.) My smaller apps performed quite well...no complaints on the low-end. On the high-end of the enterprise stack I would never trust .NET again.

Reply Parent Score: 3

segedunum Member since:
2005-07-06

I can relay a personal experience I had w/ .NET in the "enterprise" context - it was a complete disaster and eventually...a failure that was written off.

I can vouch for those experiences. There is generally some initial hype with .Net, and then reality sets in and people realise that it's just as difficult, if not more, to get working systems out of it than anything else. The Java and mainframe backends are still there, and there just simply isn't the willpower to replace them with anything else since they work and the .Net testing didn't exactly go well.

For big backends, .Net is a no go.

Reply Parent Score: 1

RE[2]: .NET in the enterprise??
by TBPrince on Sat 29th Jul 2006 15:56 in reply to "RE: .NET in the enterprise??"
TBPrince Member since:
2005-07-06

could not handle more than a handful of users across the entire system

Just for the records, how many users is a "handful of users"?

Reply Parent Score: 1

zambizzi Member since:
2006-04-23

It slowed considerably w/ five users, ground to a halt at twelve and began failing w/ exceptions and/or timeouts.

Our current systems, built w/ Java EE handle this effortlessly...and after being stress-tested w/ JMeter...will effortlessly scale to dozens of users in a non-clustered environment (if not more.)

Reply Parent Score: 1

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