> I have a small software company, and we have been trying to decide on a
> set of tools for our next product.
>
> At the end  of the day  only Java and .Net were left  standing. Still we
> can not decide.
>
> Could you please comment  on these opinions and give  us reasons to go
> for Java?, here they are:
>
> - Java apps  are slow  in the desktop

Any application can be slow or fast on the desktop, depending on how
well the application is designed. Saying that Java is slow on the
desktop is just not necessarily true. Java applications will take more
memory than a comparable C or C++ application because the C or C++
application will use a lot of the OS features which Java will implement
in a platform-independent fashion.

> - Java apps use a non-standard GUI in Windows

The Windows Look and Feel included with Java Swing is pretty good  at
this point, but it is still not exactly like the native interface. You
might also want to take a look at SWT from the Eclipse project
( http://www.eclipse.org/ ). Supposedly it is a lot closer to the
Windows look and feel.

> - Java apps are not compiled  to static  code, so they are slower than
> C/C++ or at least not faster  than VB.

Speed of an application consists of many factors, and often the actual
speed of the program executing is not the limiting factor. A lot of
applications deal with bandwidth issues, poor programming and other
problems which degrade performance. In addition, the Java Virtual
Machine has been improving steadily over the past few years and now does
quite a few optimizations which improve performance. Ultimately C/C++
will be faster than Java, but Java's other benefits (portability,
elegance, ease-of-maintenance, etc.) outweigh the speed differences in
many cases.

> - Java is only good for the server  side or the Enterprise side  of
> Computing

Java can be used in many places: server-side, client-side, cell phones,
etc. I have successfully deployed applications on both the server-side
and the client-side. It is easier to deploy on the server-side, since
that is where the focus has been recently, but client-side is improving
all the time.

> This are general  opinions, we've heard time  and time again, still we
> have no evidence that these opinions are true.

Most of the time the opinions are probably coming from people who have
limited experience or no experience with Java. Rather than believe them
you should write some test applications yourself and see the results.

> .Net supposedly does away with most of those difficulties but it
> eliminates or makes it very difficult to target  many OSes plus we
> believe is not yet mature.

I would agree with you there, but then you have to ask yourself if
targeting multiple OSes is really that important to you.