Adversaries and Partners (Continued)

Is .Net Always Easier?
Looking to stay in the lead in the traditional client-oriented software development arena, Microsoft has been busy working on their entire .Net development infrastructure with its Windows Vista project (formally known as LongHorn). Windows Vista has been in development for a long time (since 2003), but it's nearing completion and is expected to be released in 2006. Some of the new technology currently being beta tested and previewed is Microsoft's next-generation IDE: Visual Studio 2005.

Visual Studio 2005 is Microsoft's slickest development tool yet. It is armed with many developer-productivity features. The new ASP 2.0 visual controls provided in Visual Studio 2005 simplify many common Web development tasks by reducing substantially the amount of manual coding required by the application developer.. Another big feature in the new .Net release is its new team development features where the entire life cycle of development, from initial design, prototyping, coding, and unit testing to completion, is handled in a distributed environment.

Microsoft has always strived for lowering the technical bar for the larger development community of corporate developers; however, when it comes to more advanced development, people still contend that Microsoft enterprise development can be just as complex as J2EE. Another important factor is that although there are some very compelling development features provided with Microsoft's latest offerings, developers have to be comfortable with the fact that their applications will reside entirely on a Microsoft technology stack. The only exception is when Web services are used to communicate out of the stack to other services that could be running on any platform. We'll discuss more about this topic shortly.

To sum up, both the J2EE and Microsoft camps have been extremely busy retooling their architectures to enable larger portions of development communities. J2EE has a new host of J2EE IDEs that offer tremendous features for little or no cost, while Microsoft is banking on delivering a "best of quality" technology suite that all works together in a cohesive manner—providing its Microsoft technology.

Now that we've discussed some of the key aspects of both J2EE and .Net, let's take a look at some of the technologies that are very similar on both platforms and see exactly how each stacks up against the other. To begin this in-depth comparison, let's look at the component technologies JSF and Microsoft ASP.Net by comparing them directly and their respective development environments.

Since ASP has been available in the public for a longer period of time, there has been a large external development community providing an increasing amount of Web components, or to use Microsoft's terminology: controls. With the Vista release, Microsoft is also revamping their component/control technology with ASP 2.0. It is intended to be even easier to develop with than previous versions of ASP. The overriding theme for ASP 2.0 is "less coding," and less coding is achieved by making the controls themselves more intelligent, thus reducing the amount of manual coding required to customize.

This direction is logical: can you imagine if we still had to start our car engines with a hand crank? An example of ASP 2.0's improvement is evident with their new GridView control. It is more powerful than its predecessor, the DataGrid, and requires less manual coding to build a grid of data, which could be from a variety of sources, that can be scrolled, paged, sorted by column, and edited. In general, GridView, along with the other 2.0 controls, is enhanced with the vision of better productivity and less manual coding. The controls also use Visual Studio's Smart Tasks popup editors, which make them easily customizable.

In addition to ASP 2.0 enhancements, ASP has always benefited from a thriving development community that has provided many libraries of useful complementary controls in many different areas, including charting, imaging, XML, forums, and many others. These ASP libraries are easily found on Microsoft's official ASP.Net Web site (see Resources), which serves as a vast registry of numerous rich and diverse ASP controls and affiliated ASP community sites. In short, the ASP development community is thriving.