Microsoft Web Development Experience is truely more pleasant than that of Java, and i have known a number of people do the switch based on that, though they usually like to support it with some additional arguments like u did, but at the end of the day, the ease of development and that everything is right there in one place still comes through as the reason, or at least the primary reason, for the switch. As with anything in life, there is a price to pay for freedom, and Java in many ways is liberty. And guaranteeing and assuring that liberty is not an easy task. But of course you decided to make your (developer) life a little easier. cool! i only hope you thought it through. I dont think there's a point giving attention to the so called "points" you made comparing Java and C# / ASP.NET. i see them as some of those usual "add on" reasons, behind the real reason. For those of us that liberty, security, etc, are important to, the extra "burden" of Web Development in Java is "okay". Hey! by the way a person may be eight years into something and have little or no understanding of it!
Tony LaPaso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Hi all, I should mention that this post is a bit off topic. If you hate Microsoft then stop reading now and I'm sorry for wasting your time. I don't own stock in Microsoft, I don't know Bill Gates and nobody paid me or asked me to say the things I wrote below. These are just my opinions based on my experiences with many years in Java and two months of learning .NET/C# 2.0. I've been programming in Java/J2EE for the past 8+ years, most of this time as a contractor for several companies on many J2EE projects. I even have a small (and now hopelessly out of date) Java web site that I've maintained for the past 5+ years at www.absolutejava.com, which will be removed in early May. Until about 8 weeks ago, I never even considered looking at anything Microsoft offered. Recently though, on a whim, I browsed over to the Microsoft site because I'd heard about their new release of Visual Studio. I'd been a Windows programmer back in the mid '90s and was curious to see how Visual Studio (it was Visual C++ back then) had evolved (or not). I didn't download Visual Studio but instead I downloaded a couple free tutorial videos for Microsoft's "Web Developer Express" product (which is a free product, BTW). "Web Developer Express" has a subset of the features in the full "Visual Studio" product and is used for building server-side (or client side, for that matter) web apps. I couldn't believe what I saw. "Web Developer Express" blows away anything we have in the Java world for developing server-side web apps. It was kind of a jaw-dropping experience to see what the tool can do and what ASP.NET offers compared to servlets/JSP/Struts/JSTL/JSF. I don't want to turn this post into a "feature by feature" comparison of ASP.NET and equivalent Java technologies. My impression, though, from watching these tutorial videos is that we in the J2EE world are living like knuckle-dragging Barbarians, scratching out an existence clothed in bear skins, using stone knives and sticks as our tools of choice. Those using .NET are living in fine brick homes with hardwood floors, fireplaces and regular visits from PeaPod. After looking at ASP.NET I became interested in looking at the C# language, proper. My impressions of C# vs. Java mirrored those of ASP.NET vs. servlets/JSP/etc. Java has kludgey support for properties and events (they're just regular methods with parameters) while C# has the constructs (delegates & events) built directly into the core language. C# also supports co-routines, something we have to simulate in Java as well as "out parameters" (which allow a method to change the caller's parameter's value) and operator overloading. C# also has "nullable" types. Imagine Java's primitive types being able to hold null values. This is highly useful when working with databases. Finally, .NET provides an integrated and more comprehensive approach to setting security permissions and versioning of what are called, "assemblies". Assemblies are very roughly equivalent to JARs. This allows you to compile your code against a specific version of an assembly and have that version information maintained in the resulting executable. It also allows several versions of the same assemblies (again, think "JARs") to co-exist peacefully in a global, system-wide cache of assemblies. Sun should have given us something like this five years ago. Another advantage I saw with .NET is that it is more "cross language" friendly than Java. First of all, .NET, like Java, executes a "platform neutral" representation of a program (analogous to Java bytecode). Unlike Java, .NET programs can be written in many languages (C#, C++, Perl, Python, J#, VB, and many others). Microsoft's J# is, from what I've seen, a clone of Java (although I'm sure there are differences). The point I want to make is that once compiled, .NET programs can call each other seamlessly, regardless of the language the programs were originally written in. So for example, a J# class can extend a C# class which can extend a VB class. You're not tied to one language like you are in Java. I know that, theoretically, any language could potentially be compiled into Java bytecode (I guess Groovy is an example). Practically, however, this is not commonly done. Suffice it say, I am switching after 8+ years in Java. It was a tough decision at first because I have so much time and effort invested in Java. When I eventually get on a .NET project I will be starting over as a junior person making a junior person's salary. That won't be pleasant. I have close to $1,000 in Java books that I've accumulated over the years that are now for sale on Amazon. Ultimately though, I felt I'd be able to spend more time actually writing code on a single consistent, and what seems to be superior platform (.NET) rather than gluing together a half dozen open source tools with XML files, which it seems J2EE requires far too much of. To me, J2EE has become too fat and burdensome in the past few years, especially with the proliferation of so many competing open source projects. I think too much choice can be as bad as not enough choice. BTW, I realize .NET is not perceived as being as "cross platform" as Java (although that's changing as the Mono Project [http://www.mono-project.com] gains traction). Initially, this lack of "cross platformability" gave me cause for hesitation. But then I started thinking of all the J2EE projects I'd been on in the past 8 years. How many of them do you think ever used the same Java code base on multiple platforms? How many of them ever ported Java code from one platform to another? Zero. Not a single one, at least not to my knowledge. In my experience companies do not port their back-end enterprise systems between platforms. They usually know what platform they will run on long before the first line of code is ever written and they stick with that platform. So, "cross platformability" was, in my experience anyway, more applicable to systems with significant UIs and Java has not done well in this area. I think "Cross Platformability" sounded great when Java was young because we all had these visions of cool Java programs running on all these different platforms and within web browsers. It was a very seductive thought. But this vision depended on Java being a success on the desktop. So much for that. Again, this all is just my opinion and somewhat preliminary as I've only been learning C#/.NET for about 2 months now. Many of you will undoubtedly vehemently disagree with what I've said and probably suspect I have ulterior motives for making this post. I posted this because I just wanted to share what, for me, was something of a happy and exciting revelation. At this point I feel a bit like I did when I switched from C++ to Java back in 1997. I realize there is always strong and emotional anti-Microsoft sentiment in these groups for some reason. All I can say is that when I looked at what each platform offered, for me, .NET and C# were the winners, based on their technical merits. I never thought I would leave Java, especially for C#, but so far I'm not regretting it. Good luck to you all. -- Tony LaPaso --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] lekan --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? With a free 1 GB, there's more in store with Yahoo! Mail.
