 Article 3: (Title) What’s the Difference Anyway???

This article must critically compare and contrast the Java AND .NET framework and
development methodologies. In doing so, you must highlight the similarities AND
differences between BOTH approaches.

The developer might be scratching their head and wondering whether to use either the
Java (Sun Microsystems) or the .Net (Microsoft) development methodologies, and they
cannot be blamed for doing so since both are extremely popular for various large-scale
applications, gaming, IoT (Internet of Things), mobile, and web services and boast many
powerful features making it quite difficult to choose between them. This article will
critically compare them so that the developer is able to make a more informed decision
as to which is best suited to their requirements for a given project, bearing in mind that
just because there are differences this does not necessarily mean that one architecture
is better than another based upon these factors. Of course, they could decide to use
both since many application development teams will often use both these architectures
and apply them to various smaller parts of the entire software solution so that they work
in conjunction, but here we will assume that the developer is working on a smaller
project and does not have the luxury of such a large development team to take care of
everything. The first major difference is that .Net is generally only for the Windows OS
and is thus quite restrictive, although the recent release of the .Net core in June 2016
which is an open-source and cross-platform fork of the Windows-only .Net framework
has allowed developers to use the popular .Net languages e.g. C# to develop
applications that also run on Mac and Linux. However, the picture is quite confusing for
developers since the .Net core was meant for ASP.Net web applications and UWP
(Universal Windows Platform) applications running on Windows 10, whilst at the same
time the .Net framework was reserved for desktop applications. However, with the
release of .Net core 3.0 in 2019 this supports Windows Forms, WPF (Windows
Presentation Foundation) and UWP, although since these are based upon the Windows
API they are nevertheless restricted to Windows with no apparent plans for compatibility
with Mac or Linux. There are rumours that it is likely that the .Net core will be at the
forefront of desktop application development (especially since it certainly performs
better than the .Net framework) probably making the .Net framework obsolete in time
although there is a .Net framework 4.8 on its way (Anderson, T. 2018). Other
developments such as successive forks in the Entity Framework (object relational
database mapping) with one targeting the .Net framework and another targeting the
.Net core has further complicated matters and we can see immediately how complex and
convoluted development can become with Microsoft. On the other hand, Java is much
more straightforward since it is firmly rooted in the WORA (“Write once, run anywhere”)
principle which means that Java can be run on any device (the JVM is built-in, written for
each specific platform, and must interpret the bytecode which is not platform specific)
e.g. a desktop computer, a mainframe, or a smartphone that use pretty much any OS or
platform that is capable of running Java e.g. Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Android etc.
(Gibilisco. S. 2019) which entails that such source code can be said to be highly
portable. Thus, even with the advent of the .Net core Java is much more versatile in
terms of what platform it can be run on. Interestingly, this WORA principle has not gone
unnoticed by Microsoft who have themselves put a great deal of effort into developing
their API’s (Application Programming Interfaces) to reflect it although this is only a
relatively minor usage of it by comparison.
Gibilisco, S. (2019). What is write once, run anywhere (WORA)? - Definition from WhatIs.com.
[online] Available at: https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/write-once-run-anywhere-WORA
[Accessed 31 Mar. 2019].

Anderson, T. (2018). Fork it! Microsoft adds .NET Core 3.0 including Windows Desktop apps.
[online] Available at:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/07/microsoft_announces_net_core_30_including_windows
_desktop_applications/ [Accessed 31 Mar. 2019].