The background is that JNBridge picks up where interoperability efforts between Microsoft and Sun have left off. Specifically, Microsoft and Sun has focused their efforts at the web services stack, ensuring that Java spawned SOAP messages can be deciphered by .NET service providers and vice versa.

The six-year old company counts nearly 300 customers, including vendors like Adobe which OEMs its Java - .NET connectors as part of ColdFusion 8. The goal is providing the kind of granular, component, object, or class-level native functionality that you won't get when abstracting as a web service.

For the most part, the job is fairly straightforward because the .NET Framework, and the C# language especially, were designed after J2EE and Java, and therefore have strong similarities. The main challenge is workarounds for bridging obvious differences, such as the fact that .NET allows memory pointers as an option while Java and J2EE don't, and the fact that each framework handles integer and string variables differently.

The new offering for JMS deals with the reality that JMS is not a messaging protocol per se, but a bundle of standard interfaces to which J2EE vendors can exchange messages between their platforms. Consequently, there is significant variability in how each vendor applies JMS transports. For instance, IBM and Tibco often use JMS as Java APIs to their legacy MQ or Rendezvous messaging stacks.

JNBridge’s approach therefore is to hide the differences in the way JMS is implemented by each vendor. And, because its target customer base is .NET developers, it is hiding the JMS protocol as well beneath a largely declarative, forms-driven front end where you specify the specific message queues that you are targeting. As to the idiosyncrasies of each JMS implementation, that is contained within a JVM (Java Virtual Machine) that is embedded inside a .NET class.

With this release, JNBridge is also leveraging Microsoft’s newly released WCF adapters that enable you to plug into any product supporting any product that is .NET 3.0-compliant. (.NET 3.0 adds extensions for the new WinFX programming models that debuted with Vista.)

JNBridge is releasing JMS adapters for BizTalk and the .NET Framework this week. As for SQL Server, the company says there’s no need because it is a data supplier, not a consumer, and that plenty of technology and adapters already exist for Java applications to make the necessary ODBC or native Transact SQL calls.

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