Recently I started to research how to develop on .NET as I’ve been developing for JavaEE.
First thing that came to my mind as a JavaEE architect was: “Okay, IIS and ASP.NET are some of the presentation tier alternative I have for .NET but what for business tier?” or rephrasing as someone that has
been using JavaEE for a long time: “What would be the .NET EJB?”.
First thing I missed was the concept of the MDB that in .NET stack that seems to be replaced by an MSMQ message trigger.
Another major .NET difference is that even though it seems to have the concept of the VM process (as Java does) it has the concept of a shared library, or the Global Assembly Cache. If you think in terms of Java then you have to either manually replicate the jar or share them using a shared storage and having it on the classpath.
As we are on the classpath subject, .NET and its CLR seems to avoid (and limit it to J#) the concept of a ClassLoader. Although sometimes problematic, the Java concept of the ClassLoader allows very sofisticate scenarios of application composition and also for hot code generation (by the application) at runtime.
I hope this post has helped anyone in the situation as I were before and I also hope it does not sound as a comparison of which platform is better as you might guess that I sincerely know that each one has its applications, strengths and weaknesses.
IT Developer World 