July 6, 2004
J2EE and .NET: A Pragmatic View
Today a student asked me: "what are the market share figures for J2EE and .NET?"
I couldn't quote her any figures from a reputable source and gave her a vague reply along the lines of "they're both significant, J2EE has the platform independence advantage but you simply can't ignore Microsoft".
Later my searching led me to an interesting article by Ted Neward, which actually focusses on interoperability between J2EE and .NET, pointing out that it is far from being as simple as saying "Web Services". A balanced, thought-provoking read. I thought it was refreshing to see a practical, pragmatic view presented rather than one which invited a dogmatic argument.
Anyway, Ted introduced his article by stating that both platforms have 35-40% of the enterprise development market. I'm not sure where those figures came from but clearly the message is that both J2EE and .NET are going to play major roles for the foreseeable future.
And the more interesting question for large organisations is: how are J2EE and .NET systems going to talk to each other in a range of scenarios?
Posted to Software Development by Keith PittyTed Neward is very much a .NET advocate. I would try to obtain independent figures rather than those posted by advocates for either side.
I am a Java advocate. As I understand it, .NET owns the Small to Medium Business market but has little penetration in Enterprise computing where Java dominates.
Posted by: Real name at July 7, 2004 1:33 AMTed Neward has been ranting against Java for years.
(EJB will be almost a dead horse by years-end:
http://www.neward.net/ted/weblog/index.jsp?date=20021231
)
He is hardly balanced or thought-provoking.He is just another (paid?) M.S. troll
Posted by: Tom at July 7, 2004 3:51 AMJoel Spolsky is not balanced but at least he has something intelligent to say (unlike Ted Neward - he is an idiot).
How Microsoft Lost the API War:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles/APIWar.html
"Which means, suddenly, Microsoft's API doesn't matter so much. Web applications don't require Windows...Nobody wants to develop for the Windows API any more. "
Interesting. None of the authors of the above insightful comments have left a real name with an associated real web address.
I wonder if anyone will leave a more reasoned comment.
Does anyone dispute the 35-40% figure? I wonder if Ted can verify the source.
Posted by: Keith Pitty at July 7, 2004 9:57 AMStrange as for enterprise applications, I don't see much use of dotnet here in switzerland. It's a different story for 2-tiers applications (heavy client and a DB in the continuation of VB alike applications) but the heavy stuff is still done on mainframe and evolving (slowly) to J2EE, not dotnet.
Maybe can we say the global market share is almost identical for dotnet and j2ee but certainly not on the same market (office side or backend side). I guess companies already in the microsoft camp will go with dotnet but mainframe/unix based companies are not moving to dotnet, they go with J2ee.
Jose, Thanks for your impressions. I agree that organisations that have traditionally used mainframe and Unix-based applications are more likely to move to J2EE.
It would be interesting to see a survey that measured the comparitive market share in terms of deployed enterprise applications. So far, I haven't found one.
Nevertheless, I know of more than one government agency in the state of NSW here in Australia that has chosen .NET as their strategic platform. But within the same government, I also know of another government agency that has several J2EE applications deployed.
So, I think interoperability is likely to be a real issue.
Posted by: Keith Pitty at July 7, 2004 9:27 PMHi, guys!
I've been studying this exact problem for quite some time, and here are my numbers, and their sources, to the quota of the number of Java programmers divided by the number of C# programmers. Not the same as Java versus .Net, sure, but interesting anyway.
9: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~flab/languages.html
33: http://freshmeat.net/browse/160/
10: http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm
5: http://mshiltonj.com/sm/categories/languages/
6: http://lz_mordan.europe.webmatrixhosting.net/endrawresults.aspx
4: http://www.blueboard.com/phone/publishing_capacity.gif
4: Size of Orkut language communities
22: http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Programming/Languages/
Make your own conclusions! But claiming that Java and .Net has roughly equal shares of the market is simply not true, if not dishonest!
Mats
Mats: Thanks for your contribution to the discussion!
What I'd love to see is the results of a survey of large organisations in terms of deployed J2EE and .NET applications. To me, that would be more relevant to assessing share of the enterprise app market than comparing numbers of Java and C# progammers.
Posted by: Keith Pitty at July 8, 2004 11:00 PMSure, let me know if you get any such numbers.
Posted by: Mats Henricson at July 8, 2004 11:43 PM
