This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: .NET, J2EE, or something better? Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

Here's a great quote from a .NET vs. J2EE debate:

Visual Studio, like Visual Basic and other Microsoft development tools and languages, provide ease of use and a low learning curve at a price: They don't impose any kind of discipline or framework, making it too easy to crank out poorly designed apps and horrid code. This is not helped by all the amateur Visual Basic/Studio "developers" out there who have no understanding of basic comp sci concepts. (Luckily, we don't hire those kind of developers, but I'm sure we've all worked with many of them in the past.)

On the other hand, J2EE by its nature imposes some rigid rules and forces one to use some kind of a framework to deliver an enterprise level app. This takes more time, planning, and skill. As a result, though, J2EE apps, by comparison, tend to be more robust, maintainable, and scalable. This is not to say that .NET apps cannot have those qualities as well -- it just takes a lot more discipline and some self-imposed rules to achieve this -- Visual Studio doesn't give you that out of the box.

That's the mindset in too many parts of this industry - if it's simple, it can't be good. Or it won't scale. Or something. Of course, while the two pirates of complexity duke it out, people who want real productivity and simplicity can look over here. I'll be doing live updates and debugging live code in the meantime...