Getting the best of the two (otherwise mutually exclusive) worlds together!
We generally don’t talk about .NET and J2EE together unless, it's a heated debate as to which is better and why. Recently, I came across two very interesting tools which, sort of glues the otherwise mutually exclusive worlds together. The first of which is MainSoft Visual MainWin, a tool which helps C# and VB.NET developers to develop applications for J2EE platform! Do have a look at the published whitepapers here to see how the magic really happens.
Just to summarize, MainWin integrates with VS.NET seamlessly and has a compiler which converts MSIL code to Java Bytecode, which eventually executes on a JVM. Two impressive aspects of the tool are :
- Accessing JDK classes and EJB components from C# and VB.NET.
- Debugging : MainWin allows you to debug C#/VB.NET applications running on a JVM, using the full gamut of debugging features that VS.NET provides. This is really interesting, considering the amount of plumbing that might be required at runtime.
Isn't this testimonial to the fact that VS.NET is a “high productivity” developer tool? In fact, the first tenet mentioned in the whitepaper of MainWin is "Preserve the Visual Studio Developer Experience".
The next really interesting tool was IKVM.NET, which basically is a JVM for .NET and Mono runtimes. So, this is sort of a converse technology to MainWin. Using IKVM.NET, one can run Java applications on the .NET runtime by converting Java Bytecode to CIL. IKVM comes with an implementation of GNU Classpath in .NET. So, normal C# apps can leverage the entire Java class library. Also, IKVM.NET comes with a tool which converts .NET assemblies to Jar files which can be consumed by Java applications. You can also check out the IKVM.NET weblog here.
I have not really worked with IKVM.NET nor MainWin, or for that matter Java/J2EE. So, I am not in a position to really justify the practical value of these tools (I guess, there should be). But I thought it is worth mentioning about these because, if not for anything else, they can really be appreciated from the academic perspective !