It is the rare .NET developer who is able to work in complete isolation from that other great development platform of the early 21st century - Java. Microsoft tells us that there are two "right ways" to make .NET interoperate with Java:

1. Convert your Java code to .NET using either the JCLA or JbImp.exe
2. Talk to your Java code via Web services

Both of these approaches, however, suffer from considerable drawbacks. Java-to-.NET conversion tools fall far short of 100% conversion in the first case - even on the rare occasion when complete conversion is desirable. In the second case, the performance penalties associated with using Web Services for EAI are sizable and well known.

JNBridge cleverly addresses the shortcomings in both of these approaches by providing .NET with a way to natively invoke "pure" Java code, either on the same machine or across a network. It does this by offering a Java component that is able to "speak" .NET Remoting - of either the tcp/binary variety or the http/soap variety.

JNBridge provides a nice GUI tool that allows you to select the Java classes you wish to access from .NET. It then build .NET proxies for all of these objects - and any objects upon which they depend - so that a developer can be completely insulated from the fact that he or she is accessing Java components instead of .NET components. For example, even when using Java components via JNBridge, Visual Studio .NET's "IntelliSense" feature continues to work - providing real-time assistance with all the names and types for your objects and methods.

The next release of their software is supposed to offer the ability for Java software to talk natively to .NET components, also - so we will be keeping an eye on this product!