News

New Wares Bridge Java and .NET

• By John K. Waters
• June 2, 2008

Among those to extend Java-to-.NET connectivity at JavaOne, Sun Microsystems Inc.'s annual gathering of Java developers held in San Francisco, were Adobe Systems Inc., JNBridge LLC and Thought Inc. The new wares join a growing number of tools aimed at letting developers extend the reach of their apps (see sidebar, "Bridge Solutions," below).

"The alternative is re-coding those existing stacks to whatever the preferred technology for the new application would be," says Redmonk analyst Michael Cote. Most will agree that's not a reasonable alternative due to expense and the lack of developers who have such skills.

Boulder, Colo.-based JNBridge's new JNBridgePro 4.0 is aimed squarely at developers building cross-platform apps. The new release comes with a new set of plug-ins designed to expose Java classes from within the Visual Studio IDE and .NET classes from within the open source Eclipse IDE. According to the company, Visual Studio users don't need to know the underlying Java code they're accessing and Eclipse users don't need to know the underlying .NET code.

JNBridgePro provides fast access to "anything Java from anything .NET, and to anything .NET from anything Java," says JNBridge CTO Wayne Citrin. That includes EJBs, J2SE, J2EE, AWT, SWT, Swing, .NET APIs, ASP.NET, WinForms and SharePoint Server. Essentially, it creates a Java and .NET interoperability "bridge" by generating a set of proxies that exposes the classes' APIs and manages the communications between the .NET and Java classes, Citrin explains. The result is that developers can code against the opposite platform without leaving their native dev environments. It supports full-class access, and includes support for callbacks, pass by reference or by value and cross-platform exception handling.

Integration Solutions
Adobe said at JavaOne that it would be embedding the JNBridge interoperability tool in the latest release of its ColdFusion app server. ColdFusion 8 will let developers "leverage the functionality of existing .NET programs, access Microsoft products such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and easily integrate ColdFusion apps within the enterprise, either on the same Windows server or on a remote machine," Adobe said in a statement.

Meanwhile, San Francisco-based Thought, a provider of dynamic object-to-relational mapping (ORM) solutions, used JavaOne to release CocoBase 5.5. When it was introduced in 1997, CocoBase was the first 100-percent Java ORM tool. The new CocoBase 5.5 may be the first ORM tool to provide a Java Persistence API (JPA) for .NET.

The JPA was part of the Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 specification in the Java EE5 platform. It consists of the API -- as defined in the javax.persistence package -- the Java Persistence Query Language (JPQL) and object-relational metadata.

CocoBase JPA 5.5 is designed to give corporate coders a single set of persistence-programming commands and a common repository for building and deploying apps on the Java and .NET platforms, says Thought's marketing director Greg Baker. The.NET ADO -- ActiveX Data Objects, which includes a set of components for accessing data and data services -- provides a method for dealing with simple data requirements, Baker says, but not the "object lifecycle" or object-level querying.

Bridging the gap between Java and .NET technologies is an ongoing challenge for larger organization, says Bola Rotibi, principal analyst with Macehiter Ward-Dutton Ltd. Although smaller companies sometimes run pure Java or .NET shops, heterogeneity is the norm in large enterprises, she adds.

"Very few large companies settle on a single platform," Rotibi says. "You find quite a mix of Java and .NET in most large organizations -- say, Java for the back-end ... and .NET for the Web presentation layer -- and acquisitions tend to contribute to that heterogeneity." Consequently, these kinds of bridging tools can have a direct impact on developer productivity, she continues. "Most developers have at least a few languages under their belts, but they tend to be the most productive in one," she says. "And when one set of skills can play in another environment, that broadens the audience for both platforms."