Blogging Roller

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.

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 <a href= "http://www.mainsoft.com/products/vmw_j2ee.html">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.