What are the equivalent of the following .NET concepts (ASP.NET, IIS, Linq, etc.) in Java world?

Question

I'm the only one among my people who navigate in .NET water, the rest is in the Java world. So, I'd like to have some common points to talk with them. What are the equivalent concepts in Java for: (by concept, I mean the purpose of such technology)

1. Visual Studio
2. IIS
3. Linq
4. Development server that ships with VS (I don't know the name)
5. NHibernate, Subsonic, ...
6. ASP.NET WebForm (Is there any equivalent in Java with drag and drop)
7. ASP.NET MVC
8. etc.(Please, add some other concepts if they are important to know)

Thanks for helping

Answer 1

1. Visual Studio

   Visual studio is an IDE (Integrated development environment), and it doesn't just support .net. There are lots of others Eclipse or NetBeans are popular Java focused ones.

2. IIS

   IIS is a web server. Again, this is not .net specific. IIS can serve all kinds of content. Apache is a popular alternative web server.

3. Linq

   Language integrated query. Linq is made up of various extension methods to support searching and querying of data and some extra language syntax to support calling those methods in a declarative style. This is rather specific to VB & C#.

4. Development server that ships with VS (I don't know the name)

   I assume you are talking about the development Web Server. This is based on the Cassini code, and there is an extended version - UltiDev Cassini 2.0 (Free but not open source). Like IIS, it is just a web server. It can host asp.net and static html content.

5. NHibernate, Subsonic, ...

   NHibernate is actually a port of Hibernate which is a Java ORM. There are plenty of other Java ORMs available too (see this question). Most are based around the Java Persistence API (JPA).

6. ASP.NET WebForm (Is there any equivalent in Java with drag and drop)

7. ASP.NET MVC

   Java Server Pages (JSP) and Java Servlets are some technologies for dynamically generating html content in server side Java. There are lots of visual editors for JSP. See this question for some visual JSP plugins for eclipse.

   Java Server Faces (JSF) is a web app framework for Java. It follows an MVC based pattern. Again, there are various visual IDEs available for it. I think Eclipse has several visual JSF editor available as plugins.

8. Etc...

   • C# is a language. Java is a language.
   • C# is compiled to the Common Intermediate Language, Java compiles to Java Bytecode
   • CIL runs on the CLR. Java Bytecode runs on the JVM.
   • The CLR and the JVM perform JIT compilation to generate machine code for the specific platform the app is being run on.
   • Both are described as managed languages.

Answer 2

Javaland is a pretty big ecosystem. There is plethora of tools and framework to choose from and combine.

There are also popular combo like Tomcat/Spring/Hibernate, but there are of course other.

1. Many IDE available: Eclipse, NetBeans, JDevelopper, ...
2. Web container, or application server: Tomcat, Glassfish, Jetty, WebLogic, ...
3. Some third-party libraries mimic Linq, but it's not widely popular
4. ?
5. Several ORM available: JPA (specification), Hibernate, EclipseLink, TopLink, ...
6. Several component-based web framework: JSF, Wicket, ...
7. Several action-based web framework: Spring MVC, Struts (old school), ...

And I would add:

8. Build tools: Ant, Mavan
9. Version control: SVN, Git
10. Documentation: Javadoc
11. Issue trackers: JIRA, ...
12. Collaboration: Eclipse Mylin

Answer 3

For most of these there isn't a 1:1 equivalent. There are several IDEs (Eclipse, NetBeans, IDEA etc.), plenty of application servers (JBoss, BEA WebLogic etc.), web frameworks etc.

One exception is NHibernate, which is actually coming from the Java Hibernate project.