InfoWorld - Java is becoming the new Cobol.

This article pretty summarizes the sentiments of developers who worked extensively on both the Java environment and the .Net environments.

Again, I can’t comment on Ruby on Rail or PHP because I don’t have experiences with them, but what I CAN tell people is that if you are a Java/Ruby/PHP developer then you have to try out the .NET platform yourself to truly appreciate what you are missing.

It’s not a conflicted statement.   I haven’t tasted apple before, but I can still tell you if you’ve never tried orange, then you’ve missed something.  

I can’t argue with those who haven’t truly used .Net, because as with any new languages and frameworks, there is a bit of learning curve in the beginning. Frustrations and mis-understandings of the “right way” to do something new, a lot of times, prevent people from “crossing” the chasm.  

Case in point, I get this type of complaints a lot. For example, ASP.NET “ViewState” is huge and simply a waste of bandwidth, it unnecessarily produces huge page size.  The keyword is “unnecessarily” as I tell my friends. If it’s unnecessary, then please turn off the view state.  Use ViewState only if you need it, please don’t abuse it. A typical case of the paradox of choices which I admit, Microsoft offers way too many goodies to developers these days, spoiled us way too much. It definitely encouraged some bad practices simply because they are there.

It’s a leap in faith for those non .Net developers, no questions about it, however with a little bit of patience and investment in the beginning, what you’ll find out is that the return of investments of .NET platform far exceeds your expectations. The time invested into the same application, the time you saved with your family, meeting clients’ expectations and timeline, the headaches you’ve saved just to get your environment right and at finally, as a company decision maker, the ease of finding another equally qualified .NET developer without a steep learning curve; a typical short-coming suffers from the J2EE side.

For example, a Senior J2EE developer with JSP, Servlet and EJBs using IBM Websphere 5.1 on the windows platform, won’t matter much if the new environment is JSF/Spring/Hibernate using JBoss 5.0 on the Sun Solaris Unix platform.  I personally know many of my Java colleague runs away from such cases even though they are one of the best senior J2EE developers you can find in their specialized combo skill sets. It’s truly unfortunate.

Java won’t be phased out, Java won’t die, but Java sure will taste the fury of the products developed by the .Net developers in the next few years especially with what .NET 3.5 has to offer these days.  You can sigh, you can wish, but the fact remains, develop AND providing support on the .NET platform simply saves more time and human resources than on the Java platform.

This ends my thoughts as the *Java Sellout* for today ,  happy new year everyone!