Calvin Austin's Blog

August 2005 Archives

C# The saga continues and a testing competition

So back in July I was casting for ideas to write about and after an amount of googling the news saw a tiny data point hidden in a forrester report that C# only had 15% of the enterprise marketshare. That report took me back to when C# was launched. The press was reporting that it would essentially be the end of Java, and even a Microsoft employee told me in as many words that Java's days were numbered. I think I replied that we would do the best that we could do and listen to what the Java community really wanted. To be honest this was a low ball shot, it was someone I trusted and respected and I had to dig deep.

So now that predicted death didn't occur in the first 5 years why no update? Not only could I not find many other references to this report but no-one seems to be talking about it in the press. A couple of bloggers like Angsuman have noticed but thats it. If Java was in the same position it would be all over the headlines. Even skipping through Microsofts website there isn't really much in the way of promotion of C# the language at all, many visual studio pages had more references to C++ that C#. It is all .NET and Visual Studio.

Apart from the flood of .NET supporters who were focused on that I said there "has been a 2.0" and I should have said "2.0 is over a year late and Microsoft don't currently ship a version of the official C# 2.0 standard". But I digress. I started to receive emails from other readers who have been battling their own C# vs Java or more .Net vs JEE at their own workplace. Who is sticking up for Java in these situations? I really don't know, its just the technology having to speak for itself. Some of the more vocal champions and evangelists at Sun are now focused on netbeans vs eclipse but surely this opens the door to a competing technology? If I was at Microsoft I would be encouraging more competition between netbeans and eclipse, a community divided is easier to conqueror.

On a brighter note, Spikesource is running a testing competition! You don't get to see many of those, and the goal is to help foster participatory testing. The prize pool is $20,000, and all you have to do is write some test code! More details are here Open Testing Contest.

C# could be major

Yet here we are 5 years later with a new wave of languages getting the attention. Python, PHP and Ruby on Rails get more of the limelight and Java is still the choice for enterprise application development. In my book C# failed to make the grade, not just because of Java but the whole open source language landscape. You can read more of my analysis here.

OSCON conference

I'll be working on the show floor, flying out today so will be able to send some reports. I plan to meet up with some folks while I'm there. However if you just want to talk Java I'll be more than happy to lend an ear.

Technorati Profile

A Free Java Testing Tool and Open Source Business Readiness Model

Although the enterprise market has a choice of full functioning Java test generation tools there is little to none for the open source community.

Testgen4j is functioning alpha version that takes Java class files and generates automatic data driven test cases using JTestcase. It then uses junit to run them and parses the good tests from the bad. As this is the first release it supports a small set of tests (boundary) but the plan is to extend this over time.

By standardizing on junit, xml test cases file and a parser module this can be extended to cover other languages as well as build in more advanced logic.

The second project Spike Source is contributing to is an open source evaluation model called OpenBRR. For developers this should save time when making a short list of open source projects. Who hasn't taken 5 minutes to download a project and then spend the next 5 days making it work for your configuration. This project is a helpful shortcut and is a joint model proposed by Carnegie Mellon West, Intel, OReilly CodeZoo and Spike Source.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.