The .NET Meets Java panel at the St. Louis .NET User Group meeting yesterday was interesting but did not change too many people's minds, in my opinion.
There are two kinds of people there: the regular .NET User Group members who are VB6-turned-VB.NET programmers and C# programmers working at Microsoft shops (about 80%), and consultant/contractor programmers who have worked on both Java and .NET projects and a few Java people who have an interest in .NET technologies (about 20%). Microsoft (David Schmidt) was present as usual.
iBridge was the food sponsor and the fried chicken dinner was delicious. And, get this, they gave away<drum roll/>an iPhone. Steve Jobs would be pleased.
Jeff Brown, who was scheduled to appear as a Java expert, couldn't make it, so we are left with a 2-to-1 .NET vs. Java panel—Jeff Grigg, Adam Esterline, and Robert Fischer. It's not surprising that all three have experience in both the Java world and the .NET world and had I not known these people, I can't tell who's the advocate for Java and who's the advocate for .NET. As a matter of fact, one of the .NET panelists is working on a Java project with some heavy Ruby on Rails mixed in.
The leading question went like this:
I am the CIO of a company whose critical business system is a 25-year-old one maintained all these years by a single guy. Cecil is retiring this year. And I have decided that the system need a rewrite. The question is, what technology choice should I make? Java or .NET.
The panels answers are pretty much what you can expect from experienced consultants: it depends. It depends on the nature of the business and the existing infrastructure. It also depends on the size and quality of the talent pool. Robert reported that there are more Java jobs than C# jobs in the U.S (2 to 1) or even .NET jobs (5 to 4).
Jeff pointed out some intrinsic qualities of .NET and Java that might sway the decision: .NET is a one vendor product and therefore provide a more cohesive set of tools. .NET also has better multi-language programming support. And Java has a very active Open Source community that brought us such tools as Spring and Hibernate.
The .NET guys added that some of the Java Open Source tools have been ported to .NET, Mark Balbes cautioned the .NET developers to be mindful of the style/concept mismatch such ports will bring to a project.
On the runtime environment front, Microsoft claimed that everyone who wants to develop .NET applications can just download the .NET Framework for free while to develop in Java, you'd have to buy expensive IBM or BEA application servers. It is interesting that one of the .NET panelists pointed out that capable Open Source application servers and application frameworks exist and are being used in production environments. However navigate the Java frameworks scene and making an intelligent choice is more of a challenge.
On the client/GUI applications front, there is a consensus that for a Windows only environment, developing the GUI in .NET makes a lot of sense. For cross platform GUI applications, Jeff pointed out that there are Swing and SWT.
On the developer tools front, NetBeans and Eclipse were mentioned as very good Java IDEs that you can get for free. IntelliJ IDEA was mentioned by one of the .NET panelists as a superb IDE. It is interesting to see the nodding of heads from the Java developers in the audience when IDEA is mentioned. I also sensed the unfamiliarity to things like refactoring and intelligent code completion and searching from some of the Visual Studio users.
When the interoperability between Java and .NET question was asked, the standard Web Services answer was given. (About a dozen of the new book from Sun about Java and .NET interoperability is given away at the meeting. I've gotten a copy.) Jeff gave some fair warnings about the pitfalls of the ".NET GUI frontend talking to a Java backend" projects and emphasized that such projects need heavy communication between the .NET guys doing the front end and the Java guys doing the backend. Ted Neward was mentioned as the thought leader for Java/.NET interop issues. An audience member brought up IKVM as a way to make Java libraries available to .NET applications.
In response to a question "I have a .NET product, how do I expand my market to make it available to non-Windows users?" Mark Balbes suggested using VMWare to deliver the application as an appliance.
In response to a query "What happened to Rotor?" David Schmidt mentioned the story about Rotor. Back in the days when Microsoft was trying to make C# an ECMA standard, they contracted another company (Corel?) to implement the language on the BSD platform purely based on the paper specs that Microsoft gave them. Afterwards, Microsoft made the implementation, all 7 million lines of code, freely available with a read-only license. David did not waste anytime in stressing that both C# and the .NET framework are ISO standards while Java was not.
In response to a request to compare Java and C# at the language level, Jeff Grigg used the line "When programming in C#, we Java programmers have to remember to use Capital letters as the starting characters of method names." Everyone agreed that the languages are very similar.
Overall, it was an evening of civil conversations.
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