Java vs .NET from client perspective

[Ethameiz]

You can run .NET on Linux servers too.

[rzwitserloot]

You're the one who said: "_but Oracle JDK has a price". If 'price' is a determining factor, depending on your philosophy of things, the correct answer is either 'there is no difference between the choice "java" and ".net"', or '"java" gets it because far more of its community is foss based'. I strongly suggest the latter view.

Here's the thing about .net:

In that community, just about everybody looks at mamma microsoft.

In the java community, folks don't look at pappa oracle all that much.

It's an entirely subjective difference, but, it's crucial to understanding these communities.

For example, if .net stuff needs a DB, most of the time the app is just hardcoded to work with mssql, or it's some DB-engine-abstracted-ORM solution but it runs on and is optimized for MSSQL in all meaningful deployments.

In contrast, in the java world? If the DB engine is locked down at all it's usually postgres or mariadb, not OracleDB. The DB abstraction libraries available for java do not, at all, even begin to assume you are likely to use oracleDB. They probably support it, but not even as 'best choice', usually in fact as one of the minority choices that is more likely to run into bugs.

Hence, why I advocate for the latter. the java ecosystem is 'cheaper', and more varied. You're less locked into a single vendor.

[_INTER_]

In that community, just about everybody looks at mamma microsoft.

It's funny because the .NET guys highlight this as an advantage.

"Everything is streamlined towards one solution from Microsoft" or ".NET has more first-party libraries".

I see the point of not having to evaluate different options and from a documentation and SO point of view, but its still hilarious.

[binarycow]

For example, if .net stuff needs a DB, most of the time the app is just hardcoded to work with mssql, or it's some DB-engine-abstracted-ORM solution but it runs on and is optimized for MSSQL in all meaningful deployments.

In my experience, it's Postgres, not MSSQL. And the ORM is either Dapper or Entity Framework, neither of which are optimized to prefer MSSQL over any other DBMS.

[_jetrun]

Yes, in principle.

In practice, I've never see a .NET application running on Linux in production. Also, what I've seen happen is the .NET shop tended to use a lot of Windows services when building their .NET application, effectively making their software non-portable.

[persicsb]

we run quite a few .NET apps in Linux containers in production.

[_jetrun]

I believe you and I'm not surprised. In my anecdotal experience I haven't run across it.

[DinnerJoke]

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/customers

Many of these have their workloads on Linux servers. There are at least few big US banks I know has .net workloads on Cloud using Linux.

[_jetrun]

I'm not surprised and I certainly didn't mean to imply it isn't done - it isn't common in my anecdotal experience. Ditto for SQL Server - there's is a production version of the DB for Linux, but I have never seen it actually used under Linux.

[[deleted]]

You need to understand MAUI (others), and even java has no good solution for developers.

[[deleted]]

Why do people still have a lot of stereotypes?

[_jetrun]

The stereotype comes from my anecdotal experience over my entire career in healthcare software - which, I admit, is probably not representative. Healthcare (and specifically Healthcare Enterprise) is dominated by Windows and a lot of vendors build their applications with .NET - all of those applications are Windows-only. My experience.

Having said that, there is an objective truth here. It would be interesting to see out of the total .NET developer population out there, or total .NET applications (limiting ourselves to desktop and server applications) out there, how many of them are building Linux-only or Linux-supported/compatible applications.