Right now we are faced with two choices for web development .Net or not .Net. I can over-simplify the arguments for and against .Net as the following:
.NET Pluses
Developer Productivity
Negatives
Vendor lock in.
Others (including Struts)
Pluses No vendor lock in
Negatives
Less developer Productivity
It seems like many if not most companies are more interested in developer productivity.
Does anyone know of, or foresee any means by which we (developers) will be
able to be as productive using Struts/JSP/DHTML/JavaScript etc. as people
are using .Net? I'd love to be able to make a case against .Net .
I think it's been shown that the two things that make the biggest difference in productivity are
+ Communication among team members, and + The developer UI (or communication between developer and source code)
So, if it were me, and I wanted to do the Right Thing, I'd be pushing to make an Agile Methodology part of the deal, regardless, and then comparing Visual Developer with IDEA.
If there's been lower Java developer productivity in the past, IMHO, it would be for lack of a good developer's UI. (And IDEA may be the best developer's UI ever invented.)
I don't believe that, in practical terms, there is more vendor lock-in with MS than with Sun. We have more O/S tools for Java, but we've had longer to write them.
Sun does go farther to embrace the O/S community than MS. Specifications like JSTL and JSF were developed under a community process. A commendable idea, but, in practice, the process is essentially closed, except to the relatively small working group. And, of course, the source for the JVMs is still under lock and key.
Of course, many O/S developers are being compelled to go .NET, like it or not, and so we're taking our tools with us:
Mavnet - Production/stable (final release 15/may/03). http://mavnet.sourceforge.net/
NVelocity - Production/stable (version 0.4 shipped 10/jan/03). http://sourceforge.net/projects/nvelocity
NHibernate - Alpha - Good start, but now awaiting release Hibernate 2 (RC2 - 09/may/03).
http://sourceforge.net/projects/nhibernate
NUnit - Production/Stable - 2.0 02/oct/02 - new beta in active development http://sourceforge.net/projects/nunit/
Log4Net - Production/Stable - 1.1.1 13/apr/02, 1.2 B7 06/may/03 http://sourceforge.net/projects/log4net/
NAnt - Beta - 0.8.2 23/apr/03 http://sourceforge.net/projects/nant/
NLucene - Beta - Shipped b2 16/jul/02, inactive since. http://sourceforge.net/projects/nlucene
The real battle is being fought on SourceForge: Can we, as O/S developers, make C#/Java a Coke/Pepsi issue?
Platforms like .NET and J2EE will come and go, but O/S marches on.
-Ted.
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