Mainsoft Ports ASP.Net AJAX to Linux - How It Works in Practice (
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Performance tests conducted by Mainsoft indicate that the combined algorithms make .Net conversion speeds 40 to 260 percent faster and typically deliver three times the conversion speed of the equivalent Java APIs, Alaluf said. The conversion algorithm is described in detail at Mainsoft's site.
Cohen said Mainsoft has invested more than $14 million in technology that transforms ASP.Net into "a full-fledged, cross-platform development framework for the Java virtual machine."
Moreover, Cohen said Mainsoft gives software developers "the freedom to decouple development decisions from their production decisions. With the 2.2 release, developers can use the Visual Studio development environment and ASP.Net AJAX to develop enterprise applications with a sophisticated user interface, and deploy their applications on Windows servers, Java EE servers or both."
Despite the popularity of AJAX-style development, AJAX is only one component of the new technology, Cohen said. Indeed, he said only about 10 percent of Mainsoft's existing customers are interested in AJAX. But the technology "makes us a new and interesting performance environment for Web 2.0 applications," he said.
Meanwhile, Mainsoft is working on a next edition that will provide support for the .Net Framework 3.0 and some 3.5 features such as WCF (Windows Communication Foundation), Visual Studio 2008 and LINQ (Language Integrated Query), Cohen said.
SourceGear, a cross-platform developer tool vendor, used Mainsoft's Enterprise Edition to develop Eclipse plug-ins for Vault, its flagship version control tool system, and Fortress, an ALM (application lifecycle management) solution for small and midsize development teams.
Using Mainsoft's tools, "We had to make very few changes to our core client library, all fairly minor, to complete the C#-to-Java conversion," said Eric Sink, co-founder of SourceGear. "The process took about three weeks to complete."
SourceGear offers full support for Visual Studio and Eclipse clients on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
Application Development 
