The forth era of Java, the second era of .NET

Johannes Brodwall has written an excellent blog post on the history of Java. Whether you do Java development or not, the article is a great read and it will help clarifythe missed history lesson I wrote about earlier..

"There are a few things you need to understand about Java. First of all, Java is not a programming language. It is what many call a technology ecosystem. It consists of the technical foundations in the Java language and virtual machine, but also of a growing set of library functionality in the Java platform itself, and made available through open-source projects. Last, and perhaps, most important, there are strong cultural movements within the Java space. Many developers, and especially brilliant developers, will be committed to one or more of these cultural movements. The cultural movements, like any cultural movements are not static."

From "Drinking from the Java firehose"

The .NET-community also has its cultural movements. My development culture is based on .NET equivalents of the tools and platforms that make up the foundation for the fourth era of Java. One key characteristic of this era is that the business domain, sound object orientation and software engineering principles are paramount. Even if I have to use different tools, different frameworks and a different vocabulary, it has never been easier to do both .NET and Java development. In this sense, the culture driving the fourth era have made people less religious about their development platforms. Looking ahead, I suspect that crossing language and platform borders will be one of the driving forces behind the fifth era of Java - or the third era of .NET if you will.