Chapter 8: Interoperability Solutions from Third-Party Vendors

In today’s rapidly developing digital economy, businesses must reevaluate their methods of doing business in a distributed environment, preserving their heavy investment in legacy code while merging with the new technologies offered by Sun’s Java platform and Microsoft’s .NET Framework. J2EE and .NET provide numerous technologies to achieve interoperability, both internally and externally. For example, J2EE offers support for the constantly improving new technologies such as connectors and web services, whereas .NET provides multilanguage interoperability. Considering the success of the two diverse platforms and their unique approach to building distributed applications, how is it possible to take advantage of both technologies and build cross-platform applications?

Writing and Deploying Applications
for Any Platform

Developing distributed applications in either J2EE or .NET presents a problem for the programmer: selecting a platform before writing the application. Which approach will solve a particular need? Java’s philosophy is to write an application and deploy it on any platform containing a JVM. Only one caveat exists: the application must be written in the Java language.

Conversely, .NET offers developers multilanguage interoperability. A .NET application can run on any platform that has the .NET Framework on it. This is similar to a JVM, where Java bytecode can run on any platform where a copy of the JVM exists. However, currently only the Windows platforms have the Framework on them.

Enter third-party vendors. JNBridge LLC and Intrinsyc Software are two major vendors of cross-platform technologies for J2EE and .NET. Both have recognized the predicament developers face when attempting to make their choice between J2EE and .NET technologies, and they offer interoperability solutions that share much in common:

• Support for enterprise application servers, including WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, Oracle9i, Borland Enterprise Server, and JBoss

• Support for HTTP and TCP/IP protocols

• Support for SOAP

• Support for binary messages

• Client-activated and server-activated objects

• Invocation of methods on Java objects from the CLR

• Invocation of methods on CLR objects from Java

• Support for passing Java/CLR objects by reference and by value as parameters/return values

• Marshaling objects by value or by reference

• Callbacks

It is no longer necessary for developers to make a critical choice. JNBridge LLC’s product, JNBridgePro, and Intrinsyc’s Ja.NET bridge the gap between Java and .NET.

JNBridge’s cross-platform technology is available in two versions: SE (Standard Edition) and EE (Enterprise Edition). The Enterprise Edition is covered in this chapter. But before going into the details of JNBridgePro, we’ll take a brief look at Intrinsyc’s solutions.