.Net is fast becoming the developer’s platform of choice –in spite of Microsoft’s poor promotional job.
Is .Net Stealing Java’s Thunder?
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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mono is the de facto topic of this site
bah
Last time I checked I couldn’t do .net on nokia devices, and a whole slew of other mobile devices. Say when…
I’d say this article is evidence of an excellent promotional job, since MS probably partially funded it. Not to mention all of the .NET “community” websites that MSFT has built up all over the place. .NET is a pretty good technology that has been marketed well (at least after they stopped putting the .NET name on every single product they made).
MS doesn’t have to promote it ‘at all’. This is mainly due to them wanting it to replace the current windows-subsystem with it. This makes developers who want to keep up with the future eager to adopt. Java never had this going for it. It has nothing to do with the battle with Java; it’s just because windows developers don’t want to be left out of the windows-loop when microsoft switches.
That article was so biased it wasn’t even funny. It had figures saying there were more .NET developers than Java developers. There is just no way there are yet. I can believe there has been a sharp rise in .NET dev’s, but they are likely coming from existing MS technology (e.g., ASP to ASP.NET), not from Java and other technology’s (e.g., php).
I’m sorry, but I don’t care if you think .net is the greatest thing since sliced bread; we all know that you don’t get ten times the productivity by switching languages. Ok, switching from assembly to .net; yes. But one OO, large given library, garbage collected language to another?
Was he trying to optimize the java binaries by hand?
Who knows if there are more .NET developers than Java developers at this time, but inevitably there will be, just for the mere fact that if you’re going to be writing windows programs in the future, you will be almost be forced to writing towards the .NET apis.
Hysterical wishful thinking there…
Did that article mention one tenth the production costs? I must’ve missed it, but if they do claim that, then they are wack.
A thing about .NET vs Java libraries. I don’t claim to be an expert in every one(I don’t have the whole class libraries in my head), but I’ve noticed one thing different about the two different styles. Java seems to take a OO-purist approach to libraries while .NET tends to have little helper classes along side the OO classes that expose some handy static methods. Take a look at how .NET and Java handle file opening, reading, writing respectively. In Java you use a layering pattern approach to dealing with streams, while .NET kind of does the same thing, but not as verbose. Java is very verbose especially since it doesn’t have an delegate/event system in its language.
I guess the real problem is J2EE, which I guess I’ve had the good fortune to not have to deal with, since it seems almost all developers just despise it.
Linux is gaining in market share in server side so is Java.
M$ should fix IE and windows for a change.
“Who knows if there are more .NET developers than Java developers at this time, but inevitably there will be, just for the mere fact that if you’re going to be writing windows programs in the future”
well, maybe todays win32 programmers will move to .Net, but java programmers, i dont think so.
This article looks more like a marketing article instead a real one. It should be dismissed.
in moving from Java to .NET, but lemme ask: who’s winning new converts? (from the non-“managed” world to the managed world)
i think the .NET base is growing faster at this stage just because there are fewer developers…expect heavier competition when .NET matures
Having spent six months with J2EE and about a year with .NET, all I can say is that J2EE is a designed-by-committee FUBAR system compared to .NET.
J2EE is a whacked amalgamation of all sorts of stuff and is always changing. Just think in Enterprise Beans 3.0 there is an all new persistence mechanism… because the previous ways of doing it were not well thought out. Just how much money does a company have to put into tracking a giant moving “standard”??
Having worked on commercial OOP frameworks my entire career, it looks like J2EE is a giant mass of spaghetti code that was designed by OO newbies and wannabes. The design just breaks down in so many places and rockets into the sky with unneeded complexity it’s hard for me to understand why people use it at all.
If I had any sort of enterprise project there is no way I’d build it on J2EE. With all the changes and architectural instability of J2EE, it’s far more risk than going with .NET monoculture. And given that I am a big enemy of monoculture, that should tell you just how FUBAR J2EE is.
But the number of java developers in the world is miniscule compared to the number of windows developers that just target windows and don’t use java. Java developers are already in a small minority.
The article certainly wasn’t biased by any stretch of the imagination. Yes, .NET does have more developers, but that is due to the make up of the number; VB.NET + C# + Managed-C++ etc. etc. so naturally .NET will have more developers, just as there are more win32 developers than UNIX ones.
At the end of the day, the number of developers doesn’t mean alot when all the decisions are made by the PHB based on what he or she has read in the local IT management rag or what the local “evangelist” or “snake oil” sales person has spouted as the virtues of xyz technology.
Did that article mention one tenth the production costs? I must’ve missed it, but if they do claim that, then they are wack.
Here is the exact quote from the article:
“I set two goals for this company: usability and value,” Shiah says. “With .Net, we have been able to bring the cost of a BPM solution like ours down by five to 10 times that of J2EE. Everyone is looking for productivity and efficiency these days. And Microsoft helps you get it.”
So obviously Shiah is one heck of a shocking manager if he unable to control costs. I would be wonder how many strippers, pizzas and beer is being ordered each night as to explain J2EE development being 5-10x more expensive.
MS makes things user frendly, easy to use, look nice BUT under the hood it’s only a shadow of real engine in every product.
Two of my friends are developing in .net and initially they both liked it, but as the ugly parts are starting to raise their heads both of them are starting to use faul language.
Me on the other hand, I have been woring in java for 6 mo and I love it.
When all the software that you can find on apache.org (there is so many java goodness there) is made of .net I’ll consider switching.
The truth is that .net is not mature enough (may be not the language but its user base)
I’m a java developer and I don’t feel that .Net offers anything for me to justify to switch.
For my point of view .Net seems to be a clone of Java (with some differences of course) and that’s fine because Java is a good model to copy and improve.
However for me portability (including the gui) is a BIG advantage to choose Java.
I’m sure there are many java developers that feel the same way you do.
IMO, Sun has just screwed up so many times in its stewardship of Java. That, and eventually there will be a .NET runtime on every windows desktop. Java will be another huge dependency just like all languages that require a runtime/class library that most people will have to download. GCJ is pretty cool and SWT is nice, but I just won’t touch Swing. I find that C# is just a better language than Java and that MSIL and the runtime is better than Java bytecode and the Java runtime. .NET is a lot more language neutral.
Lastly, I do find that I’m more productive in C# than Java. The API and the language just seems more natural to me. I come from a C++ background.
The biggest problem is you don’t know where Microsoft will take it next. Look at the trail of “technologies” behind: VB, VC++, ASP, ASP.NET, now C# and .NET. And every time you HAVE to switch because you’re locked into whatever Microsoft wants and they force you to switch whether you like it or not. Who’s to tell they won’t change it in large amounts with .NET2003 or something like that? It’s just so iffy. By comparison, Java has a long, stable tradition of being one thing, one programming language.
Have anybody complains coplexity of enterprise J2EE systems ever heard Spring? it really is spring. Java is about choice, you can understand it once you use it.
http://www.springframework.org/
Did you just wake up from a 15 year coma? Microsoft NEVER breaks backward compatibility. Open Source breaks backward compatibility at the drop of a hat. By the way, Microsoft apis that are still being used today were developed way before Java was even a twinkle in Gosling’s eye.
Just have a look at .net 1.0 and 1.1 there were several broken apis.
And yes the windows system has lots of old apis, but from one windows version to the next, several programs usually stop working.
Face it it is close to impossible not to break backwards compatiblity.