Java Developer Trapped In an ASP.NET Landscape

Filed in archive on June 25, 2006

I'm working on an ASP.NET project right now. There are lots of web services involved and a web application that sits in front of it all. The client insisted that all this be written using Microsoft tools and VB .NET in particular. My team insisted that if we were going to do this we would use .NET but C# would be the programming language. The client reluctantly agreed. I bought a few books, started coding, and didn't sweat the small stuff.

I pretty much finished the first cut of all my web services and got everything talking to each other. I have to admit that .NET's way of building Web Services is really really easy. I'd rather do it this way than deal with Apache Axis any day.

Now I'm starting to write the web application that is going to sit in front of all this backend stuff. Since I've been doing this so long as a Java developer I automatically think about an MVC framework. The .NET stuff has ASPX pages that contain your HTML and server-side tags. At the top of these pages you than have a place were you specify the "Code Behind" file that will contain backend business logic. I dug a little deeper to find how I could implement the Microsoft pre-packaged MVC framework that comes with .NET. I figured why the hell shouldn't there be such a thing since they have a wizard for everything else in .NET.

It turns out there isn't much out there as far as MVC frameworks go for .NET web applications. I did find one called Maverick that is an Open Source project but that is it. After working with incredible Open Source frameworks that the Java community has like Struts and Spring I was a bit shocked at first.

Then I started thinking about it and understand why this has happened. The .NET world simply does not have the amazing community that Java has and it probably never will. Why would a group of developers spend the time to build a .NET MVC framework when they would most likely be undercut by Microsoft changing the rules of the game by releasing a new product that is not be backward compatible? I wouldn't want to waste my time and gamble that that would not happen.