.NET Truth: 26-30

Back to work....

26. Better Support for Peer to Peer Networks Java is used extensively to build Peer to Peer (P2P) networks. There are open source java implementations of the gnutella protocol. JXTA is an emerging standard for P2P networks and uses Java as its prototype implementations. Limewire and Kazaa downloaded hundreds of millions of times are written in Java and are among the more popular P2P clients available to date.

There are many P2P implementations avbl for .NET including one from Intel(I dont have link handy. If someone knows, post a comment).

27. Pure Java Relational Databases There are several relational databases that are implemented in Java, these are Pointbase, HSQL, Instantdb, Firstsql and Cloudbase. These are important in that they allow you to deploy a database everywhere you can deploy Java. Some of them even allow Java types to be used in the database. Another additional benefit they are much easier to install than a traditional RDMS. There are no equivalents of an RDMS written in .NET languages like C# or VB.NET.

If you want a well performing RDBMS then I would not recommend using any of the Java ones, nor any written in C# etc. I have seen people use these in small apps, where a full fledged RDBMS may be too much and I am yet to see an enterprise app built on any of these. If you are looking at a free and easy to use RDBMS, take a look at MSDE. The language used to write an RDBMS does not decide how good a language is. Then C, C++ and assembly are the best and the best RDBMS are written in those.

28.Standardized Security Java has a standard way of providing Authentication and Authorization (JSSE). The choices in .NET is limited. In fact, a well published bug in the way IE handled digital certificates required a service pack to fix.

Passports, Windows Authentication etc are standard authentication mechanisms avbl in .NET. Just because .NET supports a different set of standards, does not mean nothing is avbl.And Java has no equivalend for CAS.

29. Safer Third Party Libraries Java libraries are assumed to be 100% pure Java unless otherwise noted. .NET libraries may come in native code or IL. Native code libraries have a likelihood to make a software system unstable and insecure. In fact its not clear what percentage of code in the core .NET libraries compile to MSIL. In the .NET world the concept of safe library code is deliberately ambiguous. Rather than tell you that Windows.Forms is 90% native windows code, Microsoft prefers to be silent about it, and hope that you buy their portable and safe argument.

There are a lot of arguments on pure Java code(or pure managed code in .NET) is good or bad. For an app, it is not important, the % of pure Java code, but rather, whether it achieves its goal of user interaction. Java is not without its own set of bugs and so 100% Java code can also be buggy...:-)

30. Resusable IDE Frameworks Netbeans and Eclipse are reusable GUI Frameworks that can be leveraged in building your GUI application. This means less time building your GUI framework, and more time building the core of your application. You can't find something similar in .NET.

GUI has been one of Java's weakest links. From AWT to Swing, this has always been a problematic area....

Comments

To the first point: Swapper.NET is a Gnutella client written in .NET. I still fail to see why the fact that several applications were written on a platform that's been around longer makes Java any better than .NET.

To the "3rd party security" point: permissioning is still applied on the assembly. If you're doing COM interop (or P/Invoke for that matter) your assembly has to be sufficiently trusted.

Posted by: Tim Marman | July 28, 2003 at 05:24 PM