Java & .NET: Same idea, two solutions

Java and .NET were developed a few years ago at the same time. Despite the fact, that they were developed by two different companies, Sun and Microsoft, both technologies have similar features and represent the same concept. Both have been successful and these technologies are implemented on mobile devices, such us cell phones and smart phones.

Java and .NET were based on the definition of managed applications. Every application running on mobile device, for example a notebook or calculator, is executed in a special environment, called a sandbox. This environment separately manages that running application and can not reach information on a mobile phone, which is not available for this application. In addition, a sandbox guarantees more stable operation of applications and prohibits them to run unauthorized code or even break the operating system.

An additional advantage of sandbox, is that fact that it can be easily adapted to different hardware-platforms, which is especially valuable for mobile devices. Around the World, we have a numerous number of cell phone producers, and every producer makes a number of models and types, so the variety is enormous.

Every device represents a mini computer with its own operating system and special applications. Each producer could develop software for his product only and this how it was in past! As a result, the software developed for particular device could not be run by another system. Imagine a word processing program that worked only for HP, produced in the first half of 2008 in black and white?

Sun Incorporated became one of the first companies who brought some order to the chaos of the number of platforms used on these products. The product developed by Sun called Java Virtual Machine (JVM) – it is an incubator (or sandbox) for all programs developed using Java.

Every Java application working only under control of JVM understands what the requirements for JVM are. In order get the same results when one program runs on different platforms, it is required to create a separate JVM script for every specific platform. Oh! This is become simple rather than develop each application for every platform. So programmers began to develop JVM scripts for most commonly used platforms: BlackBerry, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, Sony-Ericsson. So, thanks for that, today, many platforms can support Java applications.Microsoft developed a programming language called .NET. Like Java, .NET has own engine (or sandbox) which was called .NET Framework. Another system called .NET Compact Framework are installed on mobile devices which will work with Windows Mobile.

Despite the fact that both Java and .NET have managed applications, their internal performance is different. Therefore, Java applications do not work with .NET and vice versa. In order to run Java application with Windows Mobile a special JVM was developed, but today it is too early to understand if such a decision will be successful.