Contents - Cultural View

Comparison of the Java and .NET platforms 97
Runtime inclusion in operating systems
.NET/Mono
On Windows, Microsoft is promoting .NET as its flagship development platform, [27] by including the .NET runtime
in Windows XP Service Pack 2 and 3, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows
7. Microsoft also distributes the Visual C# Express development environment at no cost. [28]
.NET Framework 3.5 runtime is not pre-installed on versions of Windows prior to Vista SP1, and must be
[29] [30]
downloaded by the user, which has been criticized because of its large size (65 MB download for .NET 3.5).
While neither .NET nor Mono are installed with Mac OS X out-of-the-box, the Mono project can be downloaded and
installed separately, for free, for any Mac user who wants to build and/or run C# and .NET software. As of 13 May
2008, Mono's System.Windows.Forms 2.0 is API complete (contains 100% of classes, methods etc. in Microsoft's
System.Windows.Forms 2.0); also System.Windows.Forms 2.0 works natively on Mac OS X.
C# and the CLI are included and used in a number of Linux and BSD based operating systems by way of including
[31] [32] [33]
the free software Mono Project.
As a result of inclusion of .NET or Mono runtimes in the distributions of Windows and Linux, non-GUI applications
that utilize the programming interfaces that are common to both .NET and Mono can be developed in C# or any
other .NET language and then deployed across many operating systems and processor architectures using a runtime
environment that is available as a part of the operating system's installation. [34] [35] [36] Both Microsoft .NET and the
Mono project have complete support for the Ecma- and ISO-standardized C# language and .NET runtime, and many
of Microsoft's non-standardized .NET programming interfaces have been implemented or are under development in
Mono, [37] but each environment includes many components that have not been implemented in the other.
Java
Starting with XP SP1a, Windows does not ship with a Java runtime environment. However according to a September
2003 press release some OEMs agreed to pre-install the JRE on their desktop and laptop models. Mentioned were
Acer, Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, and Toshiba. [38] These companies combined make up a simple majority of
consumer PC's sold in the United States of America. [39]
Java comes pre-installed on all new Apple computers since Mac OS X 10.0. Because Apple maintains the Java
runtime for Mac OS X, updates are usually one or two versions behind the versions available from Sun for the other
operating systems, and versions of Java are usually tied to the specific operating system version, so newer Java
versions are usually unavailable for older versions of OS X.
Java comes pre-installed with many commercial Unix flavors, including those from Sun, IBM and Hewlett Packard.
As of June 2009, the Fedora 9, [40] Ubuntu 8.04, [41] Debian, [42] Slackware extra, [43] Mandriva [44] and OpenSUSE [45]
distributions are available with OpenJDK, based completely on free and open source code. [46] Since June 2008,
OpenJDK passed all of the compatibility tests in the Java SE 6 JCK and can claim to be a fully compatible Java 6
implementation. [47] [48] OpenJDK can run complex applications such as Netbeans, Eclipse, GlassFish, or JBoss.
The Operating System Distributor License for Java (DLJ) [49] is a Sun initiative to ease distribution issues with
operating systems based on OpenSolaris or Linux.
If Java is not installed on a computer by default, it may be downloaded by the user as a web plugin. The web plugin
process has been criticized because of the size of the Java plugin. Unlike other plugins the Java download is a full
runtime environment, capable of running not just applets, but full applications and dynamic WebStart apps. Because
of this the perceived download footprint is larger than some web plugins. However, compared to Java, other popular
browser plugins have larger sizes: Java 6 JRE is 13 MB, but Acrobat Reader is 33 MB, QuickTime 19 MB,
Windows Media Player 25 MB, the .NET Framework 3.0 runtime is 54 MB, and the .NET Framework 3.5 runtime is
197 MB (it's a united package for x86, x64 and IA-64, each part has approximately 60 MB).