Live & learn

Language Syntax
Having spent an equal amount of my software engineering career in the Java and Microsoft camp, I have had the priviledge to have seen many problems solved in similar ways.

In the presentation tier, there was ASP, which was followed by JSP. JSP provided us the strength of Java in a similar syntax as ASP, freeying us from harcoded HTML in Servlets. Tag libraries were mirrored by Web Controls in the ASP.Net world.

EJB followed MTS to allow scale out scenarions in the Middle Tier. Btw, ever wondered why Microsoft did not implement Entity beans? Ask the EJB containers how complex it is to cache data in objects across a cluster, while keeping them in sync with the DB without loosing the performance benefits you were trying to accomplish in the first place :).


Under the hood
It is not uncommon for companies to evaluate and leverage learning from the "otherside", and I guess it goes both ways.


But the biggest similarity is in .Net vs J2SE, or CLR vs JVM, Bytecode vs IL, C# vs Java. If comparing the language syntax is not enough, looking under the hood at bytecode and IL, you get the picture. Callvirt or shall we say invokevirtual.



All good, looking forward what the next generation Java would look like, and then the next .Net and so on and so on....