Thread: Java or C#: which has higher compatibility?

It doesn't work that way. It will depend on you, the programmer, the ability to develop your application so a "non-techy" user can work with it without any aggravations.

That said, the .net framework is an almost guarantee on every windows computer these days. Vista and above ship with it and most XP users almost certainly have it installed already. But what about you? Do you want to learn C# or VB.Net? Do you prefer Java? Well, if its just to connect to a Access Database you can even do it in good old Visual Basic 6.0 or even in your Office suite, using VBA.

It all depends on how much effort are you willing to put into it and what are your goals concerning this project. You may just want to get it done and over with as fast as possible (Visual Basic, VBA), or you may want to grab the chance and learn a new programming language gaining a future for yourself (Java, C#, VB.Net and of course C or C++)

I use both ADO.NET & JDBC (and dont dislike either) and if I were targeting an Access database I'd go for C#. Reason being? To use Access on the Java platform I'd probably have to end up using ODBC (and I hate doing that) as most of the JDBC drivers for Access are third party and most of them cost money to use. With C# and ADO.NET you'll easily get access to Access (excuse pun) with loads of examples on the web.


>>*: Just to be clear: I hated writing the database stuff, not the java stuff. Lack of multiline string literal is horrible for writing database queries.

Agreed. That's why I end up trying to use IBatis when doing java database stuff.

I'm actually messing with some simple code at the moment to read from an Access database and I'm doing it in Python - wow, how simple! You have multiline literals and with the win32com stuff you can use ADO to get the data and stuff it into an xml doc in a few lines of code.

Sometimes I like Python too much

Originally Posted by Thantos

Lack of multiline string literal is horrible for writing database queries.

Why? This is just as clear as a multiline string literal:

Code:

String query = "SELECT * FROM foo " +
               "WHERE foo.bar = 5";

It's annoying because of the excessive use of quotes and concatenation. Some queries can run several lines and be subject to a large number of changes during the development process. Not to mention those cases where the DDL is meant to go inside the code. There's just too much of a need for copy-pasting and proper formatting which translates in a higher number of editing screw ups and too much time spent working not on the query, but on the language syntax.

Wasn't aware of the JDBC issues however. Did a very fast casual search on google and can see the problem alright. But certainly there ought to be free stuff around.

Nothing's stopping you from using a pre-processor

Originally Posted by Thantos

And you just caused a SQL syntax error.

You mean the missing space? OK, I fixed it.

Originally Posted by bithub

The error he made would happen just as easy with a multiline literal.

I think that depends on what exactly is meant by a multiline string literal. For example, this would surely result in the necessary whitespace:

Code:

String query = "SELECT * FROM foo
                WHERE foo.bar = 5";

Originally Posted by bithub

This is much easier:

In what way? The problem remains when you want to format the SQL statement over multiple lines.