A recent article on eWeek by Darryl Taft has that as the title. Not sure the fight is over, but the signs are definitley pointing towards .NET being the current darling of the Enterprise development crowd.

The following is a quote from Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s senior VP of Server and Tools business.

Five years ago we had problems with J2EE [Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition]," Muglia said. However, "We've grown from having a quarter of the market to, now, 60 percent," he said. Microsoft displayed the FAM presentations via Webcast.

"J2EE has run its course," Muglia said.

The same article quoted Gartner group as showing that IBM’s Rational is the current front runner for team tools. Microsoft’s Team System is in hot pursuit in that market as well.

What I believe we are seeing is a move back away from the ivory tower approach to software development. Just two years ago the UML was all the rage, and Patterns, Gang of Four style, were what separated the developers from the wannabe crowd. Now even the original authors of the UML have been focusing on using subsets of the specification, in other words the same approach Microsoft took as opposed to the one that Rational took.

And agile techniques have introduced concepts like refactoring to or away from patterns as opposed to attempting to implement patterns from scratch. In other words productivity is again in the driver seat and time to market has trumped design paralysis.

Does this mean Java or J2EE is going to go away? No! Far from it, however Java will probably begin a steady decline and end up with a fate similar to COBOL, e.g. still around, still in use, but only in a fixed and dwindling market segment.

Java is suffering from the same fate that has plagued Linux and the *nixs as a whole. Balkanisation. Remember the write once run anywhere claim that Java proponents made? Try it. Anything beyond the simplest hello world application takes a lot more than a simple recompile. Even on the same platform! If you switch from one application server to another you will most likely break your application.

Now while .NET has never made that particular claim, .NET and Mono has actually come closer to Java’s claim than Java has! No I don’t pretend that .NET is cross platform in all of it’s depth and breadth yet. It may never be, but Microsoft learned from Java, and wrote in essence a better Java than Java. What comes next? I don’t know, but tools and languages have come a very long way since I started programming. And I love every bit of it! I can’t wait for what's next that makes me more productive and more capable!

Cheers,

Robert Porter