> But: To me it seems, that "real" (r)evolution in software development
> in the last ~10 years or so is mostly coming from the Java related
> world (just my impression). Microsoft might have introduced some
> improvements in C#/.NET while copying Java, but I cannot see that
> amount of innovation on the Microsoft side as I see it here. There are
> many different approaches which I see as innovative work.

As already pointed out in this thread, the innovation in the Java
space tends to be more button-up driven while on the Microsoft side
it's more top-down. In Redmond, there's an interesting arsenal of
experts (Hejlsberg, Meijer, Hugunin etc.) who have been meeting in a
room 3 days a week for the last decade, who try to find ways for us to
be more productive while not melting our brain. Presumably Neal Gafter
is now part of that.

In Java, there's really no overall architects so innovation happens
much slower and often overlapping, through a committee. It has certain
other benefits. For instance, you always have had full access to (most
of) the source code, you can join mailing-lists for a given expert
group, download and build from trunk, discuss features, submit bug
reports etc. In theory anyway, doesn't always work like that as
evident by the current OSGi vs. Jigsaw dispute.

One of the reasons why personally I find the Mono project interesting,
is that it unites most of what I like from the two worlds: The experts
do the spec, the community does the implementation. And in a twist of
irony, arguably C# is more open than Java since Mono receives test
suites from Microsoft while Apache Harmony for over two years now have
been unable to receive test suites from Sun.

> What I would love to see is some good overview of available
> technologies (not only web-technologies) with recommendations for
> newcomers, what they should learn first. In one of the last podcasts
> JSF was mentioned to be a good start for learning web development -
> not sure if most others have this opinion too. I also heard a lot of
> positive words about servlets.

That's easier said than done, people will always disagree on what's
best. Servlets are just the basic foundation underneath it all, JSP
was the first abstraction on top, then a lot of other stuff and
currently the official standard/path is JSF. Here's where it gets
dirty, personally I wouldn't recommend JSF to anyone except those with
masochistic tendencies who loves XML and despise OO Java. By the sheer
up-votes on the following link, this appears to be a shared sentiment:
http://dzone.com/links/jsf_sucks_compendium_of_jsf_rantsreviews.html

So you can certainly go down the standard path, but that's not the
full Java story and I wonder how long people can actually stay on this
path before to start pulling in dependencies from left and right. I
don't think it's easy to learn practical Java in this day and age,
just getting an overview of the many various logging facilities used
is an art. It would be interesting to hear your experiences.
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