The dust is finally begin to settle here, the bloodbath of the holy wars between Java and .NET here are winding down. The winner is clear at this point, although there is still some stalwart hold outs on the opposition.
Yesterday a final blow was throw by management - recognising .NET victorious by suggesting my group develop a web center of excellence over the next few months. This center of excellence will be responsible for setting and maintaining the rules of engadgement for creating web applications on the .NET platform. Java will be forced to follow in the foot steps of .NET.
A little background before. I am a Java developer, err... well I was a Java developer. I worked at a software development house as a software engineer and release engineer where the release system, and the core product was written in Java. Even the version of Corba was the java implementation. From advanced coding, to tweaking jvm performance options, and solaris kernal parameter tuning.
Then I went on to a financials company and did Java development there too.
However I ended up in an ASP/VB environment here, and that was just painful. Then we inherited legacy systems on different platforms such as seeker, cold fusion, and domino. It was horrific. After elegant designs in java I had been tossed into a world of spaghetti, interoperability nightmares, and mangled development practices.
Rapidly as we could we moved to .NET, as a logical progression from ASP/VB. Standardizing on .NET, retiring other technologies as soon as they occured. We transitioned into a component based frame of development and now are moving to framework based development. We have a clear end game in mind - Service Orient Architecture, with solid yet agile development practices.
Meanwhile Java development here plugged along, some strong development, but not much evolution.
My goals since being here have to recognise the value proposition Microsoft puts forth: inexpensive, advanced, fast development platform. Probably the best IDE out there overall. Inexpensive server cost proposition. Easy/inexpensive developer requirements. True object oriented platform. Large framework library to leverage. Multitude of components available.
Reading the following article:
JDJ Opinion: "Java is Back!" (SYS-CON)(Printview)
made me realize that Java indeed is dying a slow death beyond the walls of this company.
Looking forward the challenge will be to keep the heat on innovating development techniques and capabilites and leading the wave of changes that will realize increased integration, reduced development time, and increased software quality.
The one area of concern I have with .NET is its adoption in integration suites by middle tier vendors. Things like document approvals and routing solutions.
Recently I was disappointed on an request for proposal, that only one vendor's solution was .NET based (adobe) and they were planning on moving to J2EE for their next version.
So the holy wars are on. Microsoft .NET has one the battle of web application development here, all that remains will be to begin to move middle tier vendors to the platform for consistancy and it will be time to look at the next holy war.
What will it be? I'm not sure. Oracle VS Sql Server?
1 comment:
That's a fascinating commentary. As an ASP developer, I found it very interesting. I have not moved to .net, nor do I intend to for a long time since the firm I work for does not have the need to go beyond ASP 3.0. That's ok by me as I spend most of my time on SEO anyway. I'm just glad to see Java is finally on the way out.
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