Developers use JNBridge Pro to quickly build high-performance applications that span Java and .NET at the class level, the company claims.

JNBridge, LLC recently announced the release of JNBridge Pro 2.2, a Java/.NET Interoperability Solution that plays like peanut butter-in-chocolate success, according to the enterprise customers DevSource interviewed.

Developers use JNBridge Pro to quickly build high-performance applications that span Java and .NET at the class level, claims the company. "Class level interoperability is good because it gives developers fine-grained access to the APIs offered across the platform gap," says JNBridge CTO Wayne Citrin. As an example, imagine that you're a bank with an investment in J2EE and EJBs. You want to access EJBs from the desktop, and you like the idea of putting a nice GUI on top. Says Citrin, "One of the things you can use our product for is to essentially bridge that gap. That's just one example — it could be a Web site using ASP.NET."

Citrin says one of the things that's different about JNBridge is that it's more flexible in the kinds of architectures you can create. "You can have Java and .NET running in the same process. You can have them on the same machines in different processes, and you can have them on different machines communicating over a network. You can make those change from one to the other without changing the code — just modify a configuration file. We're the only product that allows you to do all of that," claims Citrin.

JNBridge boasts full two-way interoperability between Java and .NET, claims the company, allowing developers to access essentially anything on the Java side from .NET or on the .Net side from Java, including methods, fields, or properties. Citrin adds, "JNBridge Pro offers faster and more fine grained interoperability than Web services and Service Oriented Architectures."

David Schumann is a Senior Programmer/Analyst for a large bank in Texas, whose project is to pull information from the IBM on-demand content management system for display on an online banking Web site, channeling a Java API into a Microsoft component, using JNBridge as a translator. "The Java.jar file is the API for invoking on-demand commands," says Schumann. "What I designed was a .NET Web service that referenced a JNBridge object designed to invoke methods on a Java.jar file responsible for interfacing with an on-demand content management server that resided on a mainframe. The Java API resided on the mainframe as a WebSphere application, along with a JNBridge component that provided the appropriate remoting."

"I would not have been able to accomplish this without affecting performance to a degree of non use without JNBridge," said Schumann.

Peter Jaffe, Chief Technology Officer at Nevo Technologies, Inc., a consultant to a large insurance company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, helped one of its clients select JNBridge adopt it, do a basic proof of concept, and implement "a couple of things, and others have done additional work with it," says Jaffe.

Jaffe described the client as a large financial institution that tends to be a Microsoft shop. "They had an ASP.NET application that had to interact with mainframe data that was a master record for a set of their financial data," said Jaffe. "The exposed interface was a Java library with a rich object model to expose the financial data from the mainframe. The gap was the VB.NET to the Java libraries. JNBridge has very strong support for bridging .NET to Java programming gaps," Jaffe said.

"Using JNBridge, my client was able to write VB.NET code directly against the JNBridge-generated proxy objects, thereby reducing what previously was thousands of lines of VB6 code that directly used JNI to invoke the java libraries to a few hundred lines of .NET code," Jaffe says.

Matt Kunze is Lead Software Designer for DataSplice, LLC of Colorado, which designs mobile data access software for handheld computers. "DataSplice provides CMMS [Computerized Maintenance Management Software] to access Maximo (www.mro.com). DataSplice operates on handhelds so the Maximo data is available to field technicians," says Kunze. "JNBridge comes in because DataSplice has a .NET integration layer and Maximo has a Java integration layer that allows us to integrate with Maximo."

"It would have been difficult to impossible — we would have had to write a whole layer ourselves if we had not used JNBridge," said Kunze.

Version 2.2 has been enhanced to support event and message handling, according to the company, and includes new features such as support in Java-to-.NET projects for callbacks, including events and delegates; pass-by-value objects; and direct-mapped collections. Date, time, extended precision values, and more are now automatically converted between .NET and Java objects. Developer licenses cost (Standard) $595 or (Enterprise) $1,995; deployment licenses cost (Standard) $95 to (Enterprise) $995.

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