The Beijing olympics are almost over, but we can still use the general olympic trope of competition between titanic forces to talk about some Java-related battles, can’t we? Well, I sure hope so, because that’s what’s about to happen. Perhaps most exciting and no-holds-barred-sy is this upcoming Java/.NET faceoff. Despite the scary boxing gloves on the official event page, nobody is going to get punched in the face; it’s more like the Lincoln-Douglas debates, except that the two principals won’t be on stage at the same time. Joe Pluta of Pluta Brothers Design will talk up Java on September 18 in Chicago, and Richard Schoen of RJS Software Systems will extol the virtues of .NET the next night. Oh, did I mention they’re specifically focusing on the two systems as they relate to IBM’s System i machines? Man, this is sounding less interesting the more I describe it. I’m starting to like the punching idea better.But maybe the two platforms can actually get along! Gautam Arora recently a New York City .NET group’s programming contest with an app with a Java back-end. As part of his internship at Morgan Stanley, Arora had to come up with a way to connect a Microsoft Office front-end to a Java back-end, and ended up using .NET as the glue. Feel free to speculate that the award he got for this indicates that (a) .NET is good for nothing but working with the monopolistic Microsoft Office, (b) Java is COBOL-style legacy code that we just have to work around, or (c) development languages are meaningless in the brave new componentized future.Java has been lumped in with a bunch of other non-iPhone mobile development platforms in an AT&T programming contest. Developers in New England can win good money for building mobile apps that run on “Java, Palm OS, RIM Blackberry, Symbian, and Windows Mobile operating systems.” (Yes, I’m aware that Java is not an operating system, and runs on all those other operating systems.) It’s kind of interesting that AT&T is running this contest, which specifically excludes the company’s own iPhone — perhaps many wireless providers are looking at the iPhone app store, slapping their forehead, and thinking “Jeez, why didn’t we think of that?” Software DevelopmentTechnology Industry