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I had some responses to my diatribe last month against the Java complainers, the most interesting of which went into this java.net blog. Off my usual performance focus, I must admit, but I guess I feel so strongly pro-Java that I felt it worth making my points.

But now I'm heading back to performance, though still slightly on the same topic. Because one of the things that repeatedly crops up as the main Java rival is .NET. Personally, I don't see the attraction. We've seen a number of comparisons. Some people mention "Mono" and get excited, though as far as I can tell if that actually ever took any business away from Microsoft they would be able to kill it instantly since they hold the patents. Apart from that how does it compare? A couple of months ago Javva The Hutt referenced the most useful functional comparison of the two that we've seen.

Performance wise this blog on .NET performance by Rico Mariani, one of the CLR architects, shows that .NET still has some way to go in catching Java performance. "Less pointers and fewer virtual methods" to improve performance is not far from saying "program functionally"- in Java, polymorphism comes at little cost and HotSpot is specifically targeted at optimizing object-oriented systems. Ah well, each to their own. Ultimately, given the resources going into the two systems (Java and .NET), there won't be much to choose between them. Except for cross-platform support and standardized APIs versus proprietary lock-in.

One final word, read Malcolm Davis's Blog entry on this. The summary point is that despite NAnt and Nunit being available (as .NET ports of Ant and JUnit), Microsoft create their own version and support that. As he says, 'imagine if you can, any Java IDE saying, "we are not going to support JUnit or Ant, we are going to construct our own tool set".'

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

In the newsletter we list our usual raft of articles, news, and we provide all our usual sections. Kirk covers the 5.0 release, reflection, Omega, and whether slowness matters in his roundup; Javva The Hutt finds a security gem and replies to some readers in his latest diary entry; we also have another new performance tuning cartoon from our cartoonist "profiler"; Our Question of the month is about classic tuning parameters; and we have many new performance tips extracted in concise form.

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

News

Java performance tuning related news.

• DevStream's Memory Scope zero analysis memory leak detector
• Managing J2EE is no longer an afterthought
• Compuware's Strobe analyses WebSphere performance
• Pitfalls of benchmarking
• Performance monitoring tools in 5.0: jconsole, jps, jstat, jstatd
• Progress towards a single persistence model
• YourKit profiler 3.0 released

A note from this newsletter's sponsor

Tools

• Fault tolerant multithreaded queueing container
• load4j open source stress testing framework
• Compuware Strobe APM solution

Recent Articles

• Threadaches (Chet Haase/java.net)
• WebSphere command caching (Joey Bernal Varaprasad Bhatta/IBM)
• Building Highly Scalable Servers with Java NIO (Nuno Santos/OnJava)
• Alerts in MIDP 2.0 (Eric Giguere/Sun)
• High Volume Batch Transaction Processing (Lara D'Abreo/DevX.com)
• Using the New Concurrent Utility Classes in Java 5.0 (Tim Stevens/informIT)
• Some Other New Features in Java 2 Standard Edition 1.5 (Dean Wette/OCI)
• State replication in the Web tier (Brian Goetz/IBM)

Jack Shirazi

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