Java Interop Tool Now Supports Windows 10, Adds 'Proxy By Name'

The Java and Microsoft .NET Framework interoperability mavens at JNBridge have upgraded their flagship JNBridgePro tool to support both Windows 10 and Visual Studio 2015. That was to be expected from the guys who have been helping to build bridges between "anything Java and anything .NET" since 2001. What stood out in this release for me was the new "Proxy By Name" feature, which was much requested by JNBridge users, company CTO Wayne Citrin told me.

"Our users like the fact that they can use proxies in Visual Studio and Eclipse, etc., but don't like the parameter placeholder names they get when IntelliSense pops up," Citrin said. "They really wanted to see the names of the original parameters, which are generally in the metadata of the underlying binaries."

Simple, right? Except traditionally that metadata hasn't been so easily extracted from Java. Enter Java 8 and the Java Reflection API, which allows for the extraction of that parameter info. "It seemed like the time was right to add this very often requested feature," Citrin said.

As the Oracle doc page describes it, the Reflection API "enables Java code to discover information about the fields, methods and constructors of loaded classes, and to use reflected fields, methods, and constructors to operate on their underlying counterparts, within security restrictions. The API accommodates applications that need access to either the public members of a target object (based on its runtime class) or the members declared by a given class. It also allows programs to suppress default reflective access control."

Proxy By Name maps the names of the underlying parameters of methods when generating proxies so that the parameters of the proxied methods have the same names as the parameters in the underlying methods. The result: Developers can better understand how the proxied methods should be used.

"We're kinda proud of this one," Citrin said, "It's always fun to finally cross off a feature request that has been on the customer request list for a number of years."

JNBridgePro is a general purpose Java/.NET interoperability tool designed to allow developers to access the entire API from either platform. As Citrin explained it to me once, the tool "connects Java and .NET Framework-based components and applications with simple-to-use Visual Studio and Eclipse plug-ins that remove the complexities of cross-platform interoperability."

The Boulder, Colo.-based company is a member of Microsoft's Visual Studio Partner (VSIP) Program, and Citrin, of course, keeps a close on developments in Redmond. At a recent VSIP event, he got to spend time digging into Visual Studio 2015.

"A lot of the cool stuff in the new release isn't something we deal with directly at the company just yet," Citrin said. "But I have to say that I'm very impressed with the Universal Windows Platform. The idea of having a single binary that should work on your phone, your tablet, your PC, your Xbox, your HoloLens, is great. I think Microsoft is going in an interesting direction."

As I've mentioned before in this space, JNBridge publishes a series of interoperability scenarios called "Labs." The company calls them "cutting-edge scenarios that showcase the myriad possibilities available to developers when bridging Java and .NET frameworks." The description is a bit hyperbolic, but the labs, which are free kits that include documentation and source code, have gotten good reviews from users. One example of a Lab: "Create a .NET-based Visual Monitoring System for Hadoop," to visually monitor the status of all the nodes in a Hadoop cluster in real time. Another: "Using a Java SSH Library to Build a BizTalk Adapter," which shows how to use Java Secure Shell (SSH) to enable BizTalk Server to manipulate remote files securely. If you use JNBridge, the Web site is worth checking out.

Posted by John K. Waters on August 21, 2015