Java vs. .NET: Someone's Going to Get a Black Eye

Published: August 27, 2008

by Dan Burger

Stop me if you've heard this one before. A guy walks into a bar wearing a Microsoft .NET T-shirt and challenges any Java-loving pansy to fight. The place gets deathly quiet, and one guy in the back of the room slides his chair back from a table, stands up, and glares at the intruder.

These kinds of encounters happen all the time, but by and large the combatants remain anonymous and the outcomes are quickly turned into folklore, with each side retelling the stories with their favorite programming environment superhero wailing the opponent into a bloody pulp. Well, get ready to pour some salt in the old Java vs. .NET wounds. The battle is about to come out of the back rooms and into the bright lights. And, by all appearances, it's going to be a fair fight.

Defending the honor of .NET will be Richard Schoen, the president and CEO of RJS Software. Upholding what is right and good about Java will be Joe Pluta, founder and chief architect of Pluta Brothers Design. The two well-known IBM System i proponents have agreed to go public with this battle in an event called the "Java-.NET Face-Off." It's scheduled for September 18 and 19 at IBM's downtown Innovation Center in Chicago, Illinois.

More than just angry words and figurative jabs aimed at differing IT philosophies, the Face-Off is a serious attempt at providing System i developers with an opportunity to compare and contrast Java and .NET development approaches in an interactive educational environment.

Pluta, a long-time Java advocate and rabid supporter of the IBM-favored System i path of Enterprise Generation Language (EGL) and Rational Developer for i SOA, has the floor on day one. Schoen, a passionate believer in Microsoft's .NET technology and the System i, gets the spotlight on day two. Each speaker will introduce attendees to the tool sets of their preferred application development environments and then guide them through a variety of hands-on development exercises. The goal of each session is to demonstrate the advantages of creating basic Web and Windows applications using one method as opposed to the other. The event will end with a panel discussion and debate between Pluta and Schoen about the pros and cons of each development approach.

What you can expect to find flying back and forth are debates over which path leads to a more proprietary solution, why IBM brought EGL into the Java camp, the facts and the myth concerning Microsoft licensing policies, whether .NET is a gateway to System i extinction, which approach is easier to learn and makes it easier to build applications, and, ultimately, which environment is conducive to programmer productivity.

Registration information, session details, and additional information on Schoen and Pluta can be found at the Java vs. .NET Web Site.

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