Mozilla vs. .Net?Friday February 9th, 2001Ian Davey writes: This is a very good article, and does a pretty good job at portraying the future of Moz apps. Building a Mozilla app is much easier than building any other. I know that my Jabberzilla client has allowed me to implement many features very easily. For example, I was able to support HTML Jabber messages in only a few hours. No other Jabber clients have this feature yet, and it is hard for them to do so. However, I have had a lot of problems too, but as this technology matures, and more resources are available, this is going to be a viable option. Especially when people can make their own Mozilla apps without needing Mozilla itself. You might be thinking that such an app would be an inefficient hog, but I was able to make a 'pretend' stand-alone Jabberzilla by stripping a bunch of files out the the regular Mozilla package that were not needed. I could then get a .zip that was only 3.8 meg. Undoubtedly, another meg could be shaved off that, at least. Eventually, I would like to see a whole OS GUI using Mozilla. That would really be cool. Oh please. How can you say that "Building a Mozilla app is much easier than building any other."? That's just silly when you think about how easy it is to build an app in any VisualStudio app (VB, VC++, VJ++..). You just *DRAW* the app, throw buttons here and there, hook them up to data sources.. Even if you hand-code all the logic with VB, the whole UI is child's play. I've seen 13 year olds code stuff like web browsers, ftp clients etc. using VB and wininet.dll, IE etc. I mean, seriously, if we're comparing .NET and thus technologies such as Windows Forms and Visual Basic and Visual Studio to Mozilla and XUL, there's no comparison in terms of ease of use! Of course if you want to code something like a web server, Photoshop or say, an e-commerce back-end, the choice is even clearer. Mozilla and XUL is good for doing things like chat clients, email clients and web browser "chrome" but if you step outside that realm, you will quickly run into problems. Sure, .NET isn't cross platform - at least not for a couple of years, so if you want your stuff to run on Linux, then you obviously can't use .NET. However, if I want a cross platform app, I would choose Java and a good IDE with a GUI builder *ANY DAY* over Mozilla and XUL. Want HTML support for messages? Get a HTML displaying JavaBean, like the one ICE Soft from Norway sells. It kicks serious ass! I'd say it's about on par in speed with Mozilla and renders with less problems on real world sites, tho it's not quite as standards compliant across the board as Mozilla is.. However for real world use, it's even BETTER than Mozilla is right now. I'm still a big Mozilla fan, and I'm not a fan of Microsoft. I just can't pretend Mozilla is heaven and .NET sucks, like you seem to be able to. Let's face the facts, Mozilla and XUL are not ready for prime time for a long time.. To be fair, nor is .NET. However I'd say the beta of VisualStudio.NET is far more usable than Mozilla is at the moment - for app development. Well, I think that you are right, for the moment. VB has been around for a while, and yes it is more mature. I think that in a year or so, the picture will look much different. Mozilla isn't even 1.0 yet, and Mozilla applications are just beginning to become visible. Maybe this article was written too early. VB is easy because you have **many avanced wizards**. With VisualC++ you can make in a few seconds a powerfull application but EMPTY. Write specific behaviour code is other thing. Wizards can be like smoke, hidden a not well designed technology like MFC library or a not oriented language like VB. The important cuestion is technology capabilities, Mozilla is prepared to do very interesant applications with a bunch of technologies to use: C++ to code XPCOM powerfull modules (or Java if you like), JavaScript to programing XUL graphic behaviour, XUL tags to define visual components. Magic wizards, tutorials, IDEs etc, go after... > Open source hasn't lent itself to > the security side of things. Too > many people know how it works, so > that the opportunity for somebody > to know how to get around the > security platform looks to be > significantly enhanced. I'd like to see how knowing how RSA works will help you break a 128 bit encryption without a major expense in resources. This is Microsoft's whole approach in a nutshell: if you hide how something works, your property is secure. Seems to me that their black-box approach isn't doing too good a job of keeping their website from being hacked. > making that form functional > using a language that you > already know, such as > VisualBasic or COBOL. Oh, goody, COBOL on the Web!!! Can I break out my old TRaSh-80 now???? .Net is being launched as server side technology mainly. Mozilla on the other hand does not have serverside components yet (other than web servers of course). For this reason alone, it cannot be an alternative to .Net. In fact I don't see any reason why you couldn't use both: do the server stuff using Microsoft's stuff and provide lightweight clients in the form of XUL/javascript stuff. The only thing Mozilla has in common with .Net is that it has a object bus similar to COM. As far as I know it isn't distributed so it is definately different from DCOM. Also, as far as I know, Mozilla does not actually support SOAP or any other RPC/Messaging stuff. Not to mention database and transaction support. The reason for this is that it's a toolkit/framework for building web enabled client applications rather than powering application servers. All this hype about Microsoft's great new technology called .Net, not only it has a bad name, but putting their every resource to it, is stupid. You may laugh at my comments after a few years, but I think it's crap. I'm laughing at your comments already. NOT putting all resources to it but just doing it half-assed would be stupid by MS. If they are going to do .NET at all, they might as well do it as well as they possibly can, with as many resources behind it as they possibly can. .NET is conceptually very much like Java. You have a virtual machine (CLR = common language runtime) and a standard library (like the Java core API). The biggest difference is that you can code to it using any language, since your code will only be compiled to an intermediate form (think Java bytecode) and then compiled to native, optimized code the first time you run it. The final compiled code is then cached for further use. This gives you cross platform AND speed AND cross language, all at once. Even if you don't get cross platform unless someone implements the CLR on other platforms than Windows, you still get a great system where you can write Windows apps using Perl, with some parts being VB, other being C++, others C#.. Which brings us to another component of .NET.. C# (C-sharp). A very well designed language that rivals and even surpasses Java in many areas. It has the best of C++ and the best of Java, combined in a great way so that you can switch between safe, garbage collected mode to unsafe mode where you manage memory yourself (for the parts that need to be really fast). .NET has a lot of potential. Just knocking it straight away because it comes from Microsoft is really stupid. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft myself but .NET kicks ass. Knocking it with a comment like "I think it's crap" without giving any reasons is dumb. I agree that .NET looks a lot like Java. Funny how MS always manages to invent things a few years after someone else did. But that is another issue. The CLR is pretty much .NETs version of Javas JVM. C# is .NETs version of Java the language. Both are to be standardized. What .NET is missing is a set of standard classes. Sure, MS is going to provide a set of classes for .NET. But they are not part of the standard and will not work on anything but Windows. And that is where cross-platform .NET falls apart. I still agree that .NET has potential, mainly because it is from MS though, not so much based on its feature set. IMO it will keep the VB programmers in the MS camp and thus stem the tide of Java defections amongst the Windows programmers. Perhaps some are even joining the club again. It will not allow cross platform apps though. -Michael I agree that .NET looks a lot like Java. Funny how MS always manages to invent things a few years after someone else did. But that is another issue. The CLR is pretty much .NETs version of Javas JVM. C# is .NETs version of Java the language. Both are to be standardized. What .NET is missing is a set of standard classes. Sure, MS is going to provide a set of classes for .NET. But they are not part of the standard and will not work on anything but Windows. And that is where cross-platform .NET falls apart. I still agree that .NET has potential, mainly because it is from MS though, not so much based on its feature set. IMO it will keep the VB programmers in the MS camp and thus stem the tide of Java defections amongst the Windows programmers. Perhaps some are even joining the club again. It will not allow cross platform apps though. -Michael I think government should create a law for such companies like microsoft that make them self rich selling already invented but make up in a different way technologies. I mean It is easy for a rich company to take main ideas (from Java for example) and hire a bunch of dumb programmers to re-make it with another name and don't even pay a cent to the original open source creators. That not only will discourage Open Source Community (that already doesnt recieve any payments) but even are been stolen by rich company (and people). This companies should be oblied to pay when ideas from open source comunities are taken to be solen. |