Comparison of the .NET Development Platform and J2EE

As competing application platforms, Microsoft’s .NET development platform and the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) from Sun are similar in their intentions and architecture but completely different in their underlying implementations. At this time, it appears that neither the .NET nor J2EE development platforms will easily dominate, which means nearly anybody developing software will at some point have to choose between the two alternatives.

Similar Missions

The .NET development platform and J2EE were created with similar goals in mind:

Enhancing developer productivity by providing developers with preexisting components that eliminate the need to write low-level routines, along with a programming model that makes it easy to reuse code components created by others

Increasing reliability by eliminating or reducing the use of some of the more error-prone constructs of development languages like C (such as pointers, which provide direct access to memory), and by using programming models that force all points of interaction between code components to be clearly defined, which isolates the impact of mistakes and makes errors easier to track