Mainsoft, which prides itself as offering a way for Visual Studio developers to deploy their apps on Java environments, is extending its capability to Ajax. Specifically, version 2.2 of the Mainsoft for Java EE tool adds support of ASP.NET for Ajax extensions to the .NET Framework. As with Mainsoft’s core tooling, developers work through a plug-in to Microsoft Visual Studio, where the main difference is the seemingly bizarro addition of Java EE to the list of project types that you can select in the IDE.

In effect, it provides an Ajax alternative to Silverlight, Microsoft’s official option for developing cross-platform rich Internet applications. The obvious benefit is that because Ajax is better known that the recently released Silverlight framework, which because of its newness, does not yet have the full richness of controls available to it, both from Microsoft and third parties like Infragistics.

It works by providing the familiar Visual Studio developer experience; the difference comes when it's time to cross-compile to Java (instead of .NET) byte code. Exceptions, such as specifying Microsoft-specific artifacts like Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS), MSMQ, or repurposing of aging COM objects, prompt a dialogue screen where the developer is asked to either select a Java alternative or do a workaround. However, for new development, exceptions should be fairly rare because by and large, .NET was designed like Java EE’s younger brother.

Additionally, as part of the release, Mainsoft has also produced an accelerator that significantly speeds up processing of numbers when working with resource-hungry markup languages like XML or HTML (both come from the same Unicode SGML root). In essence, it provides a binary representation of the number and converts it to text strings (and voice versa) that can be processed within the same thread, rather than forcing allocation of separate memory blocks. The result is a processing algorithm that converts numerical data at least twice as fast as conventional Java APIs. Mainsoft is open sourcing the algorithm and providing it to the Mono Project so it can be tweaked further.

Mainsoft’s .NET to Java EE tooling is available commercially, and as the open source Grasshopper Visual Studio plug-in offering that is developed in collaboration with Mono. Version 2.2, with Ajax and speed tweaks, is available now.

---