.NET vs. Java? It's All About Choice

I can't count the number of people in the past few years that have asked me to weigh in on the Java vs. .NET debate. You'll find my answer here, and the answer is simple. It is the only answer I know.

It depends.

Heh.

It does depend, but--for the most part--it is all about choice. In Java, you get a lot of choices. Open source vs. commercial, this platform, that platform; EJB, Pojo; Spring, Struts, Pico, foo, bar, blah blah blah. And therein lies one of the biggest problems with Java -- you have to make choices. And those choices can be non-trivial in light of the intricate version dependencies that can ensue.

With .NET on the other hand, you don't have nearly so many choices most of the time. Most of the time, you eat what Microsoft puts on your plate, and you like it, or you go to bed hungry. Most of the time, though, it is good enough.

And so you can focus on bottom-line, droll things like your business domain. You still have to focus on those things in Java, of course, you just have to after you have selected your platform, container, and so on.

That being said, it sure is nice to have some of the choices you have readily, freely available to you in Java. Like Active MQ.

---

So, given a choice between .NET and Java, I'd rather be doing Ruby.

Comments

[C. Enrique Ortiz]

"With .NET on the other hand, you don't have nearly so many choices most of the time. Most of the time, you eat what Microsoft puts on your plate, and you like it, or you go to bed hungry. Most of the time, though, it is good enough." Plus very importantly, if you code in .Net, you are married to .Net and MS OSes. So if you have a shop with MS, Unix, Linux, and so on, and your s/w must runs across these without coding things twice, Java is a better option.

[Lucian]

Hum. How about being more cheaper to produce software with Java? Linux + Jboss + Eclipse is an entirely free combination, while win2003+VS.NET is not.... Am I wrong? Lucian.

[jasonv]

For simple web apps, scripting languages like PHP/Python would do the job, so there is no need for Java MVC frameworks (struts,spring mvc,tapestry,jsf,etc.) Java Shines where you have sophisticated apps, that should deal with Distributed Transaction,Security, Load Balancing and High Availability,... need to talk to Legacy system there is JCA. JMS for MOM WebServices, etc. thats the reason one should chose java, the whole package not just writing web-apps where its much simpler in Dynamic Scripting languages ... and when we already have PHP/Python with a huge community going ruby is like ... having your 15 minute of fame in your life. impress couple of people do some apps, but 2 year from now, you will look back and say man, how pathetic :) For Enterprise Class Distributed App real developers go C/C++ CORBA UNIX C/UNIX been the same and still strong since past 30 years CORBA is still in the game after 15 years while COM is DEAD and EJB is claimed to be bitter. dig deeper. boycott .NET / J2EE go GNU !