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Mainsoft has announced tooling that enables developers to use Microsoft’s ASP.Net AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) on Linux.
A provider of .Net to Java EE (Java platform, Enterprise Edition) interoperability software, Mainsoft said its latest release provides support for Microsoft’s ASP.Net 2.0 AJAX Extensions and AJAX Control Toolkit. Mainsoft announced the technology on April 8.
Indeed, Mainsoft for Java EE Version 2.2 enables Visual C# and Visual Basic developers to use ASP.Net 2.0 components from Microsoft to create Java pages with responsive user interfaces and client/server communications by simply adding a few server controls to their ASP.Net pages, said Mainsoft CEO Yaacov Cohen.
Moreover, Mainsoft has developed high-performance algorithms to help ensure that the ported applications deliver optimal performance and scalability on Java, equivalent to the original application running in .Net, Cohen said.
Mainsoft for Java EE is based on Mono, an open-source implementation of Microsoft’s .Net Framework. Mainsoft’s support for ASP.Net AJAX Extensions enables developers to create new ASP.Net AJAX-enabled Web applications, and port existing Web applications to run natively on Apache Tomcat and IBM’s WebSphere Application Server.
Eyal Eliahu Alaluf, Mainsoft’s vice president of technology and chief architect, said Mainsoft for Java EE Version 2.2 also introduces a high-performance algorithm that optimizes the conversion of numbers to strings and vice versa. Because Internet protocols such as XML and HTML are text-based, software programs spend a considerable amount of time converting numbers to text and text to numbers, Alaluf said, so he developed the new algorithm.
How It Works in Practice
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.