A Tale of Two Web Stacks: Java vs .NET

For the last few years, I’ve focused largely on desktop development doing WPF and C#. I’ve dabbled a little here and there in web development, but the lion’s share of my web development up until the last few months occurred several years ago or earlier. Recently, I’ve been doing nothing but web development, in the form of webforms primarily, but also with Java and my home automation projects here at home. One weekend several weeks ago (it was “last weekend” when I started this post) I decided to upgrade my main machine at home from XP to Windows 7, and this required me to wipe everything and start fresh. Part of this meant that I’d have to port my IntelliJ/Spring/Maven/Java setup to a new machine.

I had ported my project from Eclipse to IntelliJ (which went very smoothly — compliments to IntelliJ), so it had been a long time since I’d actually set up a web development project in Java. Interestingly, it had also been a long time since I’d done the same in the ASP world since the work I’ve been doing the last several months had already been setup from a project structure perspective. However, given my situation with the home automation project and the fact that I’m starting on Feed paper, I’m in a unique position to document my comparative experiences with both, being in the position of generally experienced developer and relatively familiar with the technologies, but not practiced at setting up these specific types of projects. I’ve done this documentation below.

Before you read on, please note that I’m not in the tank for anyone or a fan boy of any technology, company or platform. I’ve spent years developing in both Java and .NET and there are things that I like about both. I’m a happy, equal opportunist polyglot and hope to stay that way. But for me to do so (with Java and .NET at least) would require both technologies to succeed, and I see trouble on the horizon for Java. I don’t like this because I like Java. It was a nice alternative for web development when Microsoft wanted to charge me $500 for Visual Studio and who knows what for whatever else I would have needed to write web applications. I like it because it was real, big boy server side code, capable of expansion to enterprise sites and not sloppy (I’m looking at you PHP). I like it because of the vibrant and inventive community of developers committed to improving it. But, I still think dragons be coming and Java might have a fight on its hands not to become COBOL.

Upasana from DOCC Kolkata,Visit www.docckolkata.com / Call: 9433526196