Trustworthy developers writing about both Java and .NET?

Question

Let me first of all say that I'm NOT interested in a flame war about what is better: .NET or Java... PLEASE don't post if you want to tell me how killer .NET is or how Microsoft is the evil empire so there is no way that a developer with a soul could write .NET or whatever. We've all heard it far too much before.

What I'm interested is who out there in the industry can really accurately and fairly compare and contrast the details of the two platforms. I'm looking for the rare industry luminaries who are experts in both platforms and discuss the two in reasonable terms. The only dude I'm aware of in this realm is Ted Neward if that gives you an idea of what I'm looking for. Ultimately I'm interested in their opinion of how the two platforms influence each other and what new things happening on one side are working well (which might give me insight about how the other platform is likely to evolve).

Answer 1

Martin Fowler has written about both.
Ron Jeffries would be another who has written a lot about java and has more recently written a fair bit about C#

Answer 2

I have worked with both platforms since .NET was created, mostly in dual-language projects.

Java is the "spanish" of languages (written spanish has changed little for the last few hundred years or so), C# is english (most of us are unable to read 200 year old english literature)

C# has "all the bells and whistles" added nice and clean into the language. Java is fairly primitive in comparison.

Java has a huge choice of competing libraries and different ways/styles of coding, .NET is much more "single choice"; often a good choice has been done by microsoft for you. These arguments objectively lead no-place in particular; some people may consider having a lot choice is good, others may think it is an unnecessary expense. My current java project is using NONE of the libraries I used in a similar project 5 years ago; so although the language is the same the programming environment (libraries, IDE) has improved by an astonishing amount.

So as a developer I prefer C#. Still, by choice, I work in Java right now, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future - still by choice. Although java the language evolves painfully slowly, there area a lot of really interesting things going on in java. The rest of my choice is based on all the things you specifically don't want to talk about; openness, the dark side and all that.

Answer 3

The company I work for has about half of it's development in Java (internal apps) and half in .Net (public facing apps). What is it that you want to know? there are several people in the company I work at that can contrast and compare. I admit to not knowing Java all that well though. Are you looking for specific articles, bloggers, or books?

Answer 4

Hi,

If you are looking for a person which has compaired both frameworks Java vs .Net, then I do not have a name, however there is one KEY phrase I would like to make you very aware of

Type erasure

Generics in Java <- its mentioned here, I came accorss this by word of a work friend. (Im not sure when there will be a fix for this)

This would mean java will always be boxing and unboxing.

with reference to krosenvold

Java has a huge choice of libraries and different ways of coding, .NET is much more "single choice". This is good and bad both ways.

Im not quite sure what he means by this. If i were to second guess this, you are referencing .Net's DataTable. and how .Net (used) to be data centric not domain driven?

If so I would like to mention .Net has a movement called "Alt.Net" AKA "NHibernate Mafia" where there are a number of open source libraries to allow the .net developer to do ORM/DI/MVC/TDD etc. With many of the libraries having roots from the Java world (spring, hibernate) However this is not core to the .Net or even Java Frameworks.

I would suggest considering what you want to compare. for instance

• Frameworks (including the community/opensource ones)
• Limitations (Java is 1 language, but works on multi OS, .Net is multi languge, yet "offically" supports windows platforms, using Mono)
• Avaliable IDE's

Here are some links to get you started.

Comparison of the Java and .Net platforms

Comparison of Csharp and Java (look for instance, they handle Enumerations differently)

HTH

Bones

Answer 5

I'm no Ted Neward, but I'm reasonably experienced in both Java and C#.

Despite Microsoft's early draft of the C# spec claiming that it is a mixture of C++ and VB, clearly Java was a massive influence. Since C# 1.0, however, I would argue that C# has been the language driving innovation. (Okay, a lot of the new features have already been present in other languages, but not Java...)

A lot of the proposed features from Java 7 look very much like they've been influenced by C#, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were under consideration before C# got them (just like generics in Java were being developed for years, and in the other direction there were research projects with generics in .NET before .NET 1.0 was even released).

What does the future hold? Well, personally I'd like to see a true Java 2.0 which ditches backward compatibility in order to clean up some of the messes of the past - and largely make it like C#, but with the existing platform independence. Nothing in the language of C# is tied to Windows. From that side of things, it's a real shame that Mono hasn't gone further (or been supported by Microsoft, other than Moonlight).