Question

I have seen a few examples where the architecture is that there is java on the server side and c# on the client – what makes this combination so good? why would .net on both sides not be a better choice (or in fact, java on both sides?)

added later: in lots of cases, the java is hosted on a windows server itself, i think via tomcat (not 100% sure) – what’s the motivation here?

Answer 1

Java is frequently used on the back-end (and has become the de-facto standard) for a number of reasons:

• Java can run on various operating systems transparently, from Windows development workstations to dedicated unix servers.
• Java enforces a modular, object-oriented approach to coding, which allows for large-scale systems to be written (hopefully) without becoming unmanageable. (this is also true of C#/.NET, but not true of other back-end languages such as Perl or Python)
• Java is frequently used in back-end systems (the more popular a language is for a particular application, the likelier it is that there are mature libraries and tools in that language for that particular application)

C# has great tools and libraries for designing UIs in Windows. Java’s operating system (OS)-independent nature provides fewer tools for the particular quirks of an OS’s UI, whereas C# is designed and maintained by Microsoft, for the purpose of writing Windows applications.