Dave Donaldson

I hinted that this was coming a few blog posts ago, so before we get started, let me say one thing: I am not here to get all religious between platforms or to start any holy wars. I will try to provide an objective perspective with all this. So for those of you who plan on getting all riled up and start comment-spamming me, be warned: any offensive remarks will be promptly removed. Hey, it's my blog. Also, I will come clean up front and say that most of my time is spent with Microsoft technologies (.NET in particular), but I do have a little Java programming experience and have been through intense, deep J2EE training from Trans-World Resources, via The Middleware Company (which I must say was the best training I had ever been to). My point is that I have spent at least some time on both sides of the world. Not as much as Ted Neward, but hey, who has? One last thing before we get started: I am bound to say something wrong on this topic, so if/when I do, feel free to correct me, but please do it in the right manner.

Anyway, this whole idea started when my pal Suresh sent me a link to 101 Reasons Why Java is Better than .NET (Reloaded). Of course, seeing the title I had to check it out. I expected one of two things: either a tongue-in-cheek article on platform comparison or a Java developer/community bashing Microsoft. And sad to say it was the latter.

It's certainly an interesting list with interesting perspectives (go through some of the comments). My immediate beef with it is the title is wrong. Shouldn't it be “101 Reasons Why J2EE is Better than .NET”? I mean, Java is just a programming language, it's not the platform. Yes, the platform was built on and for Java, but let's get it straight please. All too often people swap out Java for J2EE and vise-versa. Stop doing that (and you in the Java community should know better).

So going down the list, I'm going to pick on a couple:

#5 - If surveys do show Java is still the preferred platform for building web services, could you at least link to the surveys?

#6 - I don't think ASP.NET is poorly designed. If it was, wouldn't that make JavaServer Faces and Tiles also poorly designed? After all, those are the equivalent of ASP.NET WebForms and Controls, respectively.

#7 - This is true, but SQL Server “Yukon” will change that.

#8 - Nobody knows how to write good .NET applications. Hmmm. Do they mean other than Microsoft? Is there some proof in this? Is there a list somewhere of .NET applications that just sucked? Again, please point us to some of those cases, or at least give anecdotal evidence.

#23 - I don't doubt that there are very good coding tools for Java, but the VS.NET IDE rocks. I'm just now beginning to use Eclipse, so I'll probably post more on that later.

I could probably comment on each item in the list, but I'll save those for future posts. For now, enjoy the list and feel free to add your own input where appropriate.