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InfoQ Homepage News Collaboration with Mono Yields Mainsoft for Java EE

Collaboration with Mono Yields Mainsoft for Java EE

Today, Mainsoft, a leading .NET-Java EE interoperability company, announced Mainsoft for Java EE, Version 2.0. The 2.0 product suite enables .NET developers to produce .NET Web and server applications that run on Linux and other Java-enabled platforms, without having to rewrite code or learn new development skills.

Yaacov Cohen, president and CEO of Mainsoft, reports:

Mainsoft's cross-compilation software establishes C# 2.0 and Visual Basic® as fully supported languages by the Java Virtual Machine.  We’ve invested $12 million in technology that transforms Java EE into a multi-lingual platform. Our enterprise customers and software vendors de-couple development decisions from their production decisions, using the highly productive Visual Studio IDE for rapid application development and Java EE servers or portal servers for highly secure, scalable deployments.”

Mainsoft for Java EE is the result of the company’s four-year collaboration with the Mono project. Feature enhancements in version 2.0 include:

  • The Developer Edition (a.k.a. Grasshopper 2.0) is freely available and designed for individual developers and small group deployments on Apache Tomcat. It includes development and runtime licenses free-of-charge and enables developers to create Web projects using advanced .NET 2.0 functionalities such as out-of-the box ASP.NET 2.0 authentication; authorization with a pure Java datastore for membership, roles and profiles; and ASP.NET 2.0 controls, including master pages, login control, wizard, themes, and data controls such as GridView. To support multi-platform deployments, Grasshopper 2.0 comes bundled with the Apache Derby database, a highly portable database with a pure Java runtime. To speed the debugging process, developers can use the Visual Studio 2005 debugger to attach the Web application to Java and control its execution.

  • The Enterprise Edition is designed for enterprise developers and multi-CPU deployments. It includes an integrated development support for IBM WebSphere® Application Server and Tomcat; the ability to deploy to standard Java EE servers such as JBoss and BEA WebLogic®; multi-CPU capabilities; and the ability to programmatically interact with native Java class libraries and directly invoke their class methods.

  • The Portal Edition enables enterprises to populate Java EE portals such as IBM WebSphere Portal with ASP.NET 2.0 applications and services, such as SQL 2005 Reporting Services, in a tightly integrated Front-End Service Oriented Architecture. Using Mainsoft for Java EE, Portal Edition, .NET developers produce standards-compliant Java portlets that run locally on the Java EE portal, delivering a rich and well-integrated end-user environment, with role-based, personalized interfaces, single sign-on, unified navigation, inter-portlet communications, and other portal services.

Areas where Mainsoft's product is found to be lacking is in the area of Windows Forms support and .NET 3.0 support. However for this release development concentrated on ASP.NET support around Enterprise web applications where Java EE excels.


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