18 August 2010

.NET Roasts Java's Beans

Infotech reported a couple of years back that .NET adoption amongst enterprise customers has taken off at the expense of Java's market share.
I think if we are honest, most in the .NET and Java communities have known this for some time.
Oh, and then there's the fact that Oracle (which owns Java thanks to the Sun acquisition) is suing Google over patent infringement for including a Java VM with its Android operating system. Not a nice way to treat the Java community, and a sure fire way to turn big companies in particular, away from Java.
Preston Gralla sees Microsoft as the big winner in this contest, and I have to agree.
The trouble is its not all good news for .NET to see Java take a slide like this. My reasoning is simple: Microsoft need Java - they need the competition in order to make them innovate. And since .NET came out, Microsoft have been moving at light speed, averaging a major new release of the .NET framework every two years, and more recently packing the framework full of goodies like WPF, WCF, Silverlight, Entity Framework, ASP.NET MVC, Linq, new languages (F#, Iron Python), and not to mention regular new versions of Visual Studio, and now Blend.
I just hope the gradual demise of Java does not completely put the brakes on all the good, and mostly free stuff, that Microsoft is doing right now for developers.
In any case, an investment in .NET based technology (such as EPiServer) is still the safest technology bet by a long shot. .NET is here to stay, and is the dominant technology in the enterprise. Developer's love the technology, and a huge and supportive community exists around .NET in a way that has never existed for any previous Microsoft technology. There's a lot of good will in this community, a lot of sharing of ideas, and a strong, growing open source movement (check out Codeplex).

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