Technology Comparision – JAVA or .NET

Hi All,

I have been in the IT Industry for almost 8 long years. When I say 8 long years, it includes my graduation and post graduation and why not, in IT Industry every single moment of your time spent in dealing with the IT nuts and bolts adds up in making you the genuinely experienced person who has ample knowledge to deal with real time technical issues.

My initial days in the field of development included juggling with VB, Oracle, Access and Crystal Reports. That was when the bug of serious software development bit me. Initially we designed a couple of projects for a firm, as a part of their in-house software development task. It all started with simple conversion of linked excel reports into a fully functional software which at this date deals with Export and Import Invoice preparation. Those were the days when .NET was in it’s nascent stage and perhaps to be frank I didn’t even knew that such a technology exists. I always had this knack of exploring the terrain which almost all around me would desist from and that was the reason why I went for JAVA. For that matter it was a technology which was easy to fall in love with at first sight, but being a developer you know that you get married to the technology that you choose and from there on it’s an unending love affair that ceases to exist.

Carrying on with my first love I plunged into JAVA, acquainted myself with MVC architecture, Struts, Hibernate, WebLogic, JSP, Servlets, JNDI, JDBC and other ingredients that make-up this wonderful technology called JAVA. The only drawback that I faced was that as a developer I had to face hardships of mugging up the codes, the classes used, packages used, the functions present, which made it very cumbersome to design a software and at times I would end up beating around the bushes rather than concentrating on the main task of developing the software. But I was not the kind of guy who would give up so easily. At that time, I often wondered why does not SUN offers an IDE such as the Visual Basic with all the embedded intellisense and easy coding facilities. That’s when I came to know about Eclipse which was the first one to hit the market at that time but being a paid software I wasn’t able to get a hand on it. I had to wait until I caught hold of NetBeans, and I think with the launch of NetBeans which is a free software JAVA is sure to enhance it’s popularity. At the same time, around the year 2000, I heard that a new technology NGWS is making rounds, and within no time .NET was round the corner, a technology that was seriously looking forward to challenge the monopoly of JAVA as the high end development technology for the corporate giants.

“.NET or JAVA” which one is better? This is the question that often crossed my mind at that time. After ignoring this dilemma for a long time, I finally decided that I have to find a way out and decide which one is the better technology. When I followed the minds of different people engaged in both these technologies I found that every one has their own view point and often boast about the technology that they are in just because they don’t want to be tagged as the one who are using the inferior technology. Now lets face it, it’s not about the ego clashes between these two technologies, but it’s high time we give some serious thoughts on various aspects of both these technologies before plunging into any one of them. So I decided to finally bridge this gap. I decided that I have to take all the aspects i.e. financial, economic and personal into consideration before finally drawing the bottom line. It sounds funny but it is very important to consider all these aspects.

Let’s take for example the personal aspect:

If a person is a fresher in JAVA it would be very difficult for him/her to make it to the big league easily but that’s not the case with .NET. In .NET even if you are a fresher the career growth curve for you is very steep. I’m not saying that in JAVA it’s not but the point is that the ratio of opportunities for freshers in a scale of 1-10 for JAVA is 2 at max and for .NET it may be anything around 7-8.

This is just one aspect I have discussed. I’ll continue this blog with the next posting please do visit back…. Moreover you can also contact me at pradeep.sarangdharan@gmail.com