General Question

With regard to code security, both Java and .NET suffer from the same problem - the bytecode/CIL is easy to decompile which makes life difficult for developers who have 'commercial secrets' they want to protect. There are obfuscators available for both platforms which provide limited protection but the best protection is to use unmanaged code for commercially sensitive stuff which is far harder to reverse engineer.

I'm not aware of any other security differences between the two platforms.

I've heard Microsoft say that the two platforms are equally popular for Windows application development. For other platforms where .NET is not available, Java will no doubt be far more popular than Mono.

Assuming you know both platforms, then which you choose may depend on whether there are good libraries available for whatever it is you're doing.

Other things being equal, I certainly can't see any reason why experienced developers should choose Java rather than C# because the latter has far more useful features built into the language itself (notably LINQ), nowadays.

I think both platforms are likely to remain popular for the forseeable future where rapid application development (RAD) is needed though some dynamic languages (Python, Ruby, Javascript etc.) enable applications to be built even more quickly but at the cost of slower execution speed and (IMO) some loss in robustness.

For applications where execution speed, 'real time' response and low level access to the OS are more important than RAD, then C/C++ are still the best choice.

2 Replies

Know the answer? Post it — somebody with the same question will find it here.

Vulpes15y ago
With regard to code security, both Java and .NET suffer from the same problem - the bytecode/CIL is easy to decompile which makes life difficult for developers who have 'commercial secrets' they want to protect. There are obfuscators available for both platforms which provide limited protection but the best protection is to use unmanaged code for commercially sensitive stuff which is far harder to reverse engineer.

I'm not aware of any other security differences between the two platforms.

I've heard Microsoft say that the two platforms are equally popular for Windows application development. For other platforms where .NET is not available, Java will no doubt be far more popular than Mono.

Assuming you know both platforms, then which you choose may depend on whether there are good libraries available for whatever it is you're doing.

Other things being equal, I certainly can't see any reason why experienced developers should choose Java rather than C# because the latter has far more useful features built into the language itself (notably LINQ), nowadays.

I think both platforms are likely to remain popular for the forseeable future where rapid application development (RAD) is needed though some dynamic languages (Python, Ruby, Javascript etc.) enable applications to be built even more quickly but at the cost of slower execution speed and (IMO) some loss in robustness.

For applications where execution speed, 'real time' response and low level access to the OS are more important than RAD, then C/C++ are still the best choice.
Manikavelu Velayutham15y ago
Lets take Banking Domain as an example.
In Bank of America, the Core financial functionailty is handled in Java and Mainframe.
The way you represent data or to show some Dashboard kind of things, the application where the finanical activity is not inolved, such a kind of application will be developed in Dotnet.
Its just an example, there are application in dotnet in which the financial activity is done.
But it vary from scenario to scenario.
Based on various factors, it will be decided.