Blogging Roller

Dave Johnson on open web technologies, social software and Java

Above: a random selection of photos from my Flickr photo-stream.

Wednesday Feb 18, 2004

Where are those slides?

Not a very tough choice for me: should I clean up my speakers notes and post my slides tonight, or should I go out to shoot pool and tilt back a few beverages of the golden variety? Suffice it to say, you won't be seeing those slides tonight.

Running Dot-Net apps in a J2EE environment.

Remember MainSoft? They were the Win32-on-UNIX company that Microsoft didn't shoot down (unlike Bristol).

Anyhow... Matt Raible reports that MainSoft has a compiler that transforms Dot-Net apps to J2EE apps. According to the marketing materials, MainSoft's product Visual MainWin for J2EE supports Weblogic, Tomcat, and Websphere. Assuming that they support operating systems other than Windows, this is a pretty amazing engineering accomplishment. They must have both a compiler that converts MSIL bytecode into JVM bytecode and what's more, a complete compatibility layer that translates ADO.Net calls into JDBC calls, ASP.Net calls into Servlet API calls, and etc. That's amazing and a hell of a lot of work, but it is not clear to me that anybody will buy it. Win32-on-UNIX was an amazing feat too, but it did not exactly take the software development world by storm.