JNBridge Announces New Versions of Products

JNBridge announced it will be releasing new versions of all its Java/.NET interoperability products—JNBridgePro 5.0 and the 2.0 versions of JNBridge’s JMS Adapters. These products provide users with unique capabilities related to cross-platform transactions and messaging-based infrastructures.

A corporate press release explains that JNBridgePro 5.0 adds support for cross-platform transactions between Java and .NET in both the Java-to-.NET and .NET-to-Java directions. Existing solutions that support distributed transactions do not guarantee that Java and .NET transactions are interoperable; JNBridgePro now does. JNBridgePro 5.0 provides for seamless and transparent transactions between platforms, that work with all vendors’ Java EE implementations, and will simply and transparently manage the two-phase commit protocol that guarantees the integrity of the transaction.

 “Surveys show that the majority of enterprises develop in both Java and .NET, which allows developers and architects to select the best platform for any given application,” said Al Hilwa, senior analyst at IDC. “Financial and e-commerce applications that rely on transactions haven’t been allowed the same freedom of choice, because the integrity of the data could not be guaranteed. Cross-platform transaction processing capability is an often requested functionality for shops tasked with integrating Java and .NET applications.”

 “Transactions are the glue that make electronic commerce work,” explained Wayne Citrin, CTO of JNBridge. “Cross-platform transactions have never really been done successfully before. We’ve opened up new territory for what’s possible, and greatly extended the reach of Java and .NET interoperability.”

 At the 2009 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) I caught up with Wayne Citron and chatted about the new versions versions of all three JNBridge products. Citron noted that the big new feature in JNBridgePro 5.0 is cross-platform bridging, saying that “if you have transactional code on both the Java and .NET sides (for example, a bank or an e-commence company that has business logic that needs to be part of the transaction on both sides) this will transparently connect the transactions on both the Java and the .NET side. If they both succeed, great. If one side fails, it needs to be rolled back—both sides will be rolled back. This is something people have asked us about for a long time.”

Citron explained that the other two products, the JMS Adapters, have been upgraded to version 2.0 and use new components from the new 5.0 version of JNBridgePro. In response to customer feedback, the BizTalk Server Adapter includes new messaging patterns, things like request response and solicit response, which the BizTalk adapter framework supports. Citron said that both adapters have more flexible architecture support: “You can actually separate the Java and .NET pieces via the adapter now and put them in separate processes. That means that the user has to be a little more vigilant in starting up the Java backend process. But on the other hand, the user will get higher memory ceilings in case they have lots of volume. This will only be used by customers in extreme situations, but it’s there if they need it.”

Although the new versions of the products aren’t compliant with .NET 4.0 or Visual Studio, Citron says that they’ve done testing against .NET 4.0 and have made changes to their products to bring them closer together: “We have some early adopters, including some Microsoft people playing with our products and 4.0 and they’ve been very good about telling us what needs to be done.” He added, “I’ll reveal a secret. Even though we don’t support Visual Studio 2010 in our new release, if an intrepid customer installs our stuff in Visual Studio 2010 on their machine the plug-in will work, mostly.”

Citron revealed that JNBridge is targeting its 5.1 release of JNBridge Pro to ship around the same time as the Visual Studio launch in March.

I asked Citron if JNBridge was contemplating adding other technologies in addition to Java and .NET to their product line. He replied that “right now there’s still plenty to do with .NET and Java. Rather than branch into other technologies, and I’m not saying we won’t, but we found that’s been useful to concentrate on targeted products like our JMS Adapter. We’ll be looking at other Java technologies, other .NET technologies—perhaps .NET compact framework or things like that. We haven’t found any other platforms that have the same kind of reach and market potential.”

For more information, go to http://www.jnbridge.com/ .