Comparison
In the view of experienced Java developers,. NET may be similar to the Java platform, providing a structured approach to creating applications, with languages compiled as intermediate code, and providing a large API library for application development. But in fact, the core of. NET has different goals from the Java platform.
Conceptually, Java is two things: the Java platform (Runtime and API) and the Java language. The purpose of the Java platform is to support applications written in the Java language and compiled into Java bytecode. Although many attempts have been made to compile other languages into Java bytecode, much of this work is academic. Java's ideal goal has been to "use a language on a variety of platforms."
. NET is also two things: the. NET Framework (Runtime and API) and a large number of programming languages that support it. The purpose of the. NET Framework is to support applications written in either language and compiled to MSIL.. NET's goal is to "share a platform in multiple languages."