Mainsoft announced that its latest release of Mainsoft products provide full support for Microsoft's ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions and AJAX Control Toolkit. Mainsoft for Java EE, version 2.2, allows Visual C# and Visual Basic developers to use ASP.NET 2.0 components from Microsoft to create Java pages with sophisticated, responsive user interfaces and efficient client-server communications by adding a few server controls to their ASP.NET pages. Ported applications deliver equivalent performance and scalability on Java as the original application delivers in .NET.

"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," said Yaacov Cohen, president and CEO of Mainsoft. "We give software developers the freedom to de-couple 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."

Mainsoft for Java EE is the result of the company’s five-year collaboration with Mono. Sponsored by Novell, the open source development initiative is developing an open source, multi-platform version of the Microsoft .NET (.NET 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5) technologies.

ASP.NET AJAX Extensions and Control Toolkit
Mainsoft' s ASP.NET AJAX Extensions allows developers to create new ASP.NET AJAX-enabled Web applications, and port existing Web applications to run natively on Tomcat and WebSphere Application Server. Full support for the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit allows developers to use controls such as the AutoComplete, HoverMenu, and Popup controls to create an interactive Web experience. A future edition will support ASP.NET AJAX on WebSphere Portal.

Performance Optimization
Version 2.2 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. Performance tests, conducted by Mainsoft, indicate that the combined algorithms make .NET conversion speeds 40% to 260% faster and typically deliver 3x the conversion speed of the equivalent Java APIs.

"Version 2.2 incorporates numerous performance enhancements developed over the past five years to ensure ported applications perform and scale as well on the Java VM as the original application performs on .NET," said Eyal Eliahu Alaluf, vice president of technology at Mainsoft. "Today, any developer who can build a well-structured .NET application, and is knowledgeable about how the Java VM works, can deliver equivalent performance and scalability on Java and .NET."

Mainsoft's cross-platform consultants were the first to deliver equivalent performance on .NET and Java. “As part of a 2007 performance study, we tuned our open source .NET implementation to fit WebSphere Application Server's architectural strengths to deliver equivalent performance and scalability under Java EE on Linux as the original .NET application. In the process, we identified the need to optimize the IBM Java Virtual Machine on some scenarios that were exposed with our libraries. These changes are now widely available in the WebSphere Application server 6.1 release," added Alaluf.

Cross-Platform .NET in Practice
Enterprise customers, software vendors, tool vendors, and solution providers worldwide are using Mainsoft software to deliver Java deployments. Among them:

• Gaiaware, an AJAX library vendor for ASP.NET, used Grasshopper to build a Java version of Gaia AJAX Widgets, an open source AJAX library for ASP.NET, in less than two weeks. "Mainsoft made the process of running Gaia applications on Java EE incredibly easy," said Thomas Hansen, founder of Gaiaware. "The alternative, manually porting a library that took us ten man-years to develop, and maintaining two separate code bases, would have cost us millions of dollars. Thanks to Mainsoft, our users have the freedom to run the Gaia application on their preferred deployment platform."
• Healthways, a provider of specialized, comprehensive Health and Care Support solutions, built a fully featured, Java-based self-service fulfillment portal for 27 million members in five months and a second portal for heath plans sponsors in just three months. Explained David Jarmoluk, director of enterprise architecture for Healthways, "The development experience was highly intuitive. Our C# developers were developing Java portlets after one day of a two-day training session with Mainsoft consultants." Healthways' future development plans include AJAX and .NET 3.5 technologies such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF).
• RJS Software, a provider of System i and Windows document management, data integration, and report automation software, integrated a Visual Basic-based Imaging and Document Management System into WebSphere Portal in three weeks. Richard Schoen, president and CTO of RJS Software, estimates that using Mainsoft to port the application was $300,000 less than rewriting the application in Java.
• Tachyon Software Engineering, AG, an application development and consulting firm, used its Visual Studio development expertise to create a Web interface for a banking customer's Solaris-based electronic invoicing system, and the application is currently in production. "Using Mainsoft, we developed the application just as we would develop a typical IIS application; we didn’t even consider the application was running on UNIX," said Jerry Gucher, president of Tachyon. "The application meets our customer’s performance and business requirements, and it costs one-third less than what it would have cost had we attempted to learn Eclipse and write the application in Java."
• 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 Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution for small and medium-sized development teams. Explained Eric Sink, software craftsman and co-founder of SourceGear: "We had to make very few changes to our core client library, all fairly minor, to complete the C#-to-Java conversion. The process took about three weeks to complete." Since June 2007, SourceGear offers full support for Visual Studio and Eclipse clients on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.