As part of our 10 year celebration, we had this video made. It was a pretty amazing process: something like 30,000 stills got photographed and distilled into this 3.5 minute short story.

Can’t see the video in your feed? Go here: jnbridge.com/videoscribe.htm.

Share and enjoy!

JNBridge will be supporting Visual Studio 11 at RTM. As we mentioned in February, it’s already working with early bits, so we’ll be ready in time.

If you’re chomping at the bit, contact us, and we’ll walk you through a few extra steps it takes to get it to work today.

As you’re probably aware, Microsoft today released the new Windows 8 Consumer Preview and the new Visual Studio 11 beta. While we of course don’t yet support JNBridgePro on Windows 8 and VS11, we do encourage you to try it and let us know about any problems you run into.

In our initial tests, JNBridgePro 6.0.1 (our current release) installs and runs fine on the Windows 8 desktop environment. Nothing new or special needs to be done to get that working.  (We do concede that the tiles on the Start screen could be prettier.)

In addition, the JNBridgePro plugin for Visual Studio also works with the new Visual Studio 11 beta, with a little bit of help. If you want to use the plugin with VS11, please contact us, and we’ll let you know what needs to be done. Note that the plugin will not work with the Express version of VS11; it’ll only work with the Standard, Professional, Premium, and Ultimate versions.

Also note that JNBridgePro is not a Metro app, and the generated proxies are not targeted toward the .NET Metro profile, so it currently won’t run in the Windows 8 Metro environment. Are you planning to use JNBridgePro in Metro apps? If so, please contact us.

One of the most frequently used BizTalk adapters is the File Adapter. While its most common use is in tutorials and customer evaluations, the File Adapter is essential in situations where BizTalk needs to be integrated with other applications that are self-contained and not designed for connectivity. In such situations, the other applications can simply drop documents in a folder, and the File Adapter simply reads the new documents as they appear. The adapter can also write documents to a folder, from where they can be read by the other applications.

Recently, we had a conversation with a customer who was using the standard File Adapter to process files. The files had been transfered to the Windows server from a Linux server via a Java Secure Shell (SSH) client, a perfect example of file-level interoperability between platforms. Secure Shell is a secure network protocol that enables shell services between client and server machines providing remote command execution and file transfer. SSH servers and clients are most prevalent on Linux/Unix platforms as a standard component of the OS. There are, of course, SSH clients and servers that run on Windows, but they are rarely used.

Obviously, for the customer, the best implementation would be a BizTalk adapter that supports SSH, specifically the SFTP channel for file transfer, in order to avoid the extra step in transferring the file via SSH, followed by reading it with the File Adapter. In addition, an SSH/SFTP adapter would enable secure, encrypted file transfer over the public internet between, for example, a company’s IT infrastructure on the ground and resources that reside in the cloud. We decided to investigate whether it would be possible to use the File Adapter example in the BizTalk Adapter Framework SDK as a starting point to build a SSH/SFTP adapter. This would require a SSH API, preferably one that’s open source. We based the adapter on a Java SSH client library, and used JNBridgePro to bridge from the .NET-based adapter framework because there’s no open source .NET SSH API that is current, or been released. There are several open source Java SSH class libraries available; we chose JCraft’s Java Secure Channel—JSch—because of its prevalence in Java developement tools and IDEs. JSch is distributed under a BSD-like license.

JNBridgePro 6.0  allows us to proxy the JSch class library directly to .NET. During execution, a JNBridgePro .NET proxy represents an instance of a Java class running in the JVM. The interoperability bridge between the CLR and the JVM manages method calls between the proxy and the Java object, data marshaling/representation and object life cycle.  Here’s a closer look at how JNBridgePro works.

The BizTalk Adapter Framework .NET File Adapter example

Preliminary Tasks

The very first step is to make sure we can build and deploy the File Adapter before modifying the code. This involves building the three projects we’ve consolodated into one Visual Studio solution: AdapterManagement, DotNetFile and Microsoft.Samples.BizTalk.Adapter.Common. In order to build the adapter, the only thing we need to do is repoint the reference to the adapter base class library in the DotNetFile project because the path has changed. While it is possible to unload the project from Visual Studio and edit the project file as a text file, it is simpler and less error-prone to remove and then re-add the reference.

Deploying a BizTalk adapter is done using registry entries. There are a couple of ‘.reg’ files with the example. We’ll use the registration entries file, StaticAdapterManagement.reg. However, because the example was copied from the BizTalk install directory to a working directory, the regisitry file must be edited to modify the paths to the management and run-time assemblies. We also can edit the name of the adapter stored in the TransportType key from “Static DotNetFile” to “JNBPSshFile” to avoid confusion.

Bridging the JSch Java API to .NET

JCraft’s open source SSH class library is written in Java. A BizTalk adapter is written in .NET C#. Use JNBridgePro to create .NET proxies of the JSch classes that represent the Java classes during development and at run-time. To do so, we’ll add a JNBridge DotNetToJavaProxies project  to the adapter solution using the provided Visual Studio plug-in. We also need the JSch library, the JAR file jsch-0.1.45.jar.

The first task is to configure the proxy project’s class path to point to the JSch JAR file. The JNBridgePro development environment consists of a proxy tool that uses reflection to expose the Java classes—the public methods and variables—in the JAR file. Before we start exposing the Java classes, we’ll need to tell the proxy tool what classes we need to proxy to .NET. We could expose everything in the JAR file, but by looking at JCraft’s sample Java source (which we’ll draw heavily from when we code in C#), we can determine in advance the pertinent classes. Add the classes from the class path using the proxy tool, as shown below.

Because we’ve checked the box Include supporting classes, the proxy tool will also load all class dependencies from the com.jcraft.* namespace as well as those from the JRE, like java.util.Vector. We can then choose exactly which Java classes we would like proxied into an assembly. The next screen shot shows the proxy tool with the loaded classes on the left and the selected classes on the right. The far right displays the interface of the class Channel. The abstract Channel class will be proxied along with the class that extends it, ChannelSftp.

Coding: Change from a File Adapter to a Secure FTP adapter

The adapter currently understands how to consume and place files locally. We need to modify the configuration interface for the adapter to support SSH/SFTP. We’ll leave the transport handler configurations alone and modify only the transmit and receive location configurations. We’ll be able to leverage some of the existing properties, like directory and fileMask, but will have to add properties that handle SSH connection and credential arguments. We’re going to keep things simple and only use simple security—a user name and password—instead of more robust public/private key pair encryption. Hardening the security of user credentials is left  as an exercise to the reader. We then add the following to the source file ReceiveLocation.xsd and TransmitLocation.xsd.

<xs:element name=”host” default =”localhost” type=”xs:string” >
<xs:annotation>
<xs:appinfo>
<baf:designer>
<baf:displayname _locID=”hostName”>in resource file</baf:displayname>
<baf:description _locID=”hostDesc”>in resource file</baf:description>
<baf:category _locID=”SSHCategory”>in resource file</baf:category>
</baf:designer>
</xs:appinfo>
</xs:annotation>
</xs:element>
<xs:element name=”port” default=”22″ type=”xs:int” >…</xs:element>
<xs:element name=”user” type=”xs:string” >…</xs:element>
<xs:element name=”password” type=”xs:string” >…</xs:element>

The block of XSD code shows the schema for the host property that’s used to populate the location property grid and create the XML document that contains the location’s configuration. The strings used for the display name, description, etc… are in the resource file, DotNetFileResource.resx. The schema for the remaining properties will be similar. To correctly parse the the XML document in order to retrieve the configuration values, add the following C# code (again, just using the host property as an example—the other properties will have similar code) to the classes DotNetFileReceiveProperties and DotNetFileTransmitProperties, both defined in the file DotNetFileProperties.cs. The static utility method IfExistsExtract() is defined in ConfigProperties.cs in the adapter base classes.

private string hostName;
public string HostName { get { return this.hostName; } }
public override void ReadLocationConfiguration (XmlDocument configDOM)
{
// to this method, add lines like this for each property:
this.hostName = IfExistsExtract(configDOM, “/Config/host”, “localhost”);
}

Once done with modifying the adapter’s properties to accommodate an interface for SSH, we can fire up the BizTalk Admin Console, create a receive location and open the property sheet. Here’s what it looks like.

Coding the SSH/SFTP adapter

All of the C# code will be added to the DotNetFile project. We’ve already added the properties code to DotNetFileProperties.cs, now it’s time to start coding the adapter. First, add a couple of references to the project: one to point to the JNBridgePro proxy assembly, the other to point to the JNBridgePro run-time, JNBShare.dll.

Initiating the Java/.NET bridge

The bridge between the CLR and the JVM will use a shared memory transport. The JVM will run as a thread within the BizTalk Server process. Thankfully, JNBridgePro hides all the details. A new source file, JNBridgeProInit.cs, will define the static class JNBridgeProInit. The class has one method, init(). Because a process can have only one JVM instance, we’ll need to provide a mechanism to ensure that JNBridgePro is initialized once, and only once, per process. The bridge needs a pointer to the Java Virtual Machine, the JNBridgePro run-time assemblies and JAR files and a class path pointing to the JSch JAR file.

Coding a .NET implementation of a Java interface

When connecting to a SSH server, the server negotiates security credentials by asking the client for a user name and password or a private key and pass phrase. JCraft’s JSch provides a convenient Java interface, com.jcraft.jsch.UserInfo, that when implemented returns the required information. When we built the proxy assembly using the JNBridgePro proxy tool, the Java interface was mapped to a .NET interface. We can implement the interface in the class UserInfoImpl, which we’ll place in the file UserInfoImpl.cs. Because an instance of UserInfoImpl will be created on the .NET side, but called on the Java side of the bridge, we’ll have to use a JNBridgePro Callback attribute to decorate the interface implementation.

Initiating JSch

Now it’s time to code against the JCraft JSch class library. Because our project references the proxy assembly we built in the JNBridgePro project, we can code in C# as if JSch were implemented in .NET. In fact, we can use the example Java code that ships with JSch as a starting point. First, we need a method to initiate a JSch context, connect to a SSH server and create the SFTP channel. We’ll add the following private instance variables to the two endpoint classes, DotNetFileTransmitterEndpoint and DotNetFileReceiverEndpoint, in DotNetFileReceiverEndpoint.cs and DotNetFileTransmitterEndpoint.cs.

We’ll now add the following method to the two endpoint classes.  Notice the line where an object of type Channel is cast to type ChannelSftp. If the cast to System.Object is not done first, Visual Studio will complain. Using the proxy tool, we can take a look at the class hierarchy. The public class ChannelSftp inherits from ChannelSession, which in turn inherits from the abstract base class Channel. The problem is that ChannelSession is not public while the abstract base class and ChannelSftp are public. Java has the concept of  default access—not specified private, public or protected—allowing the class to be accessible within its own package, like ChannelSession. Java allows a cast from a base class to subclass even if intermediate subclasses have default access. The C# language requires that the entire class hierarchy be public if any subclass is public. If not, Visual Studio refuses to build the assembly.  The point is that this is a language restriction, not a restriction, or lack of mechanism, in the target byte-code. JNBridgePro constructs the proxy assembly directly to MSIL, where classes are either Public or NotPublic. The intermediate cast to Object just gets past the language restriction imposed by the C# specification and Visual Studio. Yes, it’s a hack, but if we didn’t use the indirection, we’d have to code a Java wrapper to do the cast, create a .NET proxy of the wrapper and then call the wrapper to cast on the Java side.

Paths

We’ll need to add some  code to perform transformations between Windows-style and Unix-style paths such as the directory property that tells the adapter where to look for, or place, files that end in the specified qualifier. Even when a SSH server is running on Windows, paths must be in a Unix-like format, so the path C:\Users\MyAccount\Downloads must be changed to /users/myaccount/downloads. Luckily, JSch provides a method for path transformation. We’ll add the path transformation code to the Open() method of both endpoint classes. Here’s  the receive endpoint code.

Receiving  Files: SFTP get

The Java type byte is signed. JNBridgePro converts Java signed bytes to the .NET type sbyte. Converting back to type byte involves a little indirection. The use of the unchecked keyword makes sure that there is no run-time exception. Using unchecked is equivalent to casting a void  pointer in C—the bits are taken at face value with no overflow checking. Besides using the JSch class library, this code uses two standard types from the Java run-time library, Vector and ByteArrayOutputStream.

The class BatchInfo maintains a list of the files that have been received. The ReceiveBatch constructor accepts as an argument the callback method BatchInfo.OnBatchComplete(). When the batch has been successfully submitted to the BizTalk Message Box, the callback method will delete the files.

com.jcraft.jsch.ChannelSftp.LsEntry entry;
List<BatchMessage> files = new List<BatchMessage>();
java.util.Vector list = this.sftpChannel.ls(this.properties.FileMask);
int len = list.size();
for (int ndx = 0; ndx < len; ndx++)
{
entry = (com.jcraft.jsch.ChannelSftp.LsEntry)list.elementAt(ndx);
string fileName = entry.getFilename();
java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream byteArrayOStrm = new java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream();
this.sftpChannel.get(fileName, byteArrayOStrm);
sbyte[] sbytes = byteArrayOStrm.toByteArray();
byte[] bytes;
unchecked
{
bytes = (byte[])((Array)sbytes);
}
fs = new MemoryStream(bytes);
IBaseMessagePart part = this.messageFactory.CreateMessagePart();
part.Data = fs;
IBaseMessage message = this.messageFactory.CreateMessage();
message.AddPart(MESSAGE_BODY, part, true);
SystemMessageContext context = new SystemMessageContext(message.Context);
context.InboundTransportLocation = this.properties.Uri;
context.InboundTransportType = this.transportType;
files.Add(new BatchMessage(message, fileName, BatchOperationType.Submit));
}
if (files.Count > 0)
{
BatchInfo batchInfo = new BatchInfo(files, this.sftpChannel);
using (ReceiveBatch batch = new ReceiveBatch(this.transportProxy
, this.controlledTermination
, batchInfo.OnBatchComplete
, this.properties.MaximumNumberOfFiles))
{
foreach (BatchMessage file in files)
batch.SubmitMessage(file.Message, file.UserData);
batch.Done(null);
}
}

Transmitting Files: SFTP put

The BizTalk Adapter Framework calls this method in DotNetFileTransmitterEndpoint whenever a BTS message is available to a subscribing transmit location. The method readStreamToBuffer() copies the message body to an array of type sbyte.

public override IBaseMessage ProcessMessage(IBaseMessage message)
{
Stream source = message.BodyPart.Data;
DotNetFileTransmitProperties props = new DotNetFileTransmitProperties(message
, propertyNamespace);
if (props.Directory != this.currentPath)
{
this.currentPath = props.Directory;
string aPath = props.Directory.Substring(Path.GetPathRoot(props.Directory).Length);
this.sftpChannel.cd(“/”);
aPath = this.sftpChannel.realpath(aPath);
this.sftpChannel.cd(aPath);
}
string filePath = DotNetFileTransmitProperties.CreateFileName(message, props.Uri);
filePath = filePath.Remove(0, filePath.LastIndexOf(“\\”) + 1);
sbyte[] sbytes = this.readStreamToBuffer(source);
java.io.ByteArrayInputStream inputStream = new java.io.ByteArrayInputStream(sbytes);
this.sftpChannel.put(inputStream, filePath);
return null;
}

Running the adapter

Testing the adapter is simple. For example, we can create an Ubuntu VM running in Amazon’s EC2 using a pre-configured Amazon Machine Image. Using the standard File Adapter and the SSH/SFTP Adapter we’ve just created, we can configure two send ports and two receive ports. Using simple routing, we can drop a file into a directory on the local Windows machine where a receive location routes the message to a send port configured with the SSH/SFTP prototype adapter. The file is transmitted to /home/myaccount/Downloads on the Linux VM where a second SSH/SFTP receive location grabs the file and routes it to a send port which drops it into a directory back on the local machine.

Wrap-up

We’ve shown how it’s straightforward to create a BizTalk SSH/SFTP adapter using JNBridgePro and the BizTalk Adapter Framework SDK. An adapter like this one can be used to allow BizTalk Server to read and write files securely to and from the cloud, and to communicate easily with Unix/Linux machines.

Note that the instructions and code that are given here are just a foundation—a production adapter will likely need to be enhanced with more hardened credential management, more flexible configuration options, and enhanced exception handling. The adapter can also be enhanced to support additional SSH functionality, including additional file manipulation and securely running applications on remote machines. Also, the adapter is targeted toward the Jsch implementation of SSH, but it is a simple matter to retarget it to other SSH implementations.

While the adapter should be enhanced for most production situations, what we’ve provided here provides a solid start that should allow you to create a useful BizTalk SSH adapter for real-world situations.

If interested, the source is here.

Join us, we’re celebrating: JNBridge is 10 years old! And what a decade it’s been. We’re going to celebrate all year, but to kick it off we’ll start with a brief retrospective of 2002.

Ten things that happened 10 years ago:

1. In January, Sun and Microsoft settled their suit. Sun had sued Microsoft for incompletely implementing the Java 1.1 standard. Microsoft paid Sun $20 million, and agreed to phase out their version of Java.
2. J2SE 1.4 was released on February 6, 2002.
3. Microsoft .NET Framework version 1 was released on February 13, 2002.
4. JNBridgePro version 1.0 was released June 3, 2002. Version 1.0 was a one-way bridge that allowed .NET to call Java.
5. JNBridgePro version 1.1 was released on August 9, 2002, it added support for J2EE.
6. JNBridge’s press releases early in the year instructed the reader how to pronounce .NET (“dot net”).
7. JNBridgePro version 1.2, released November 8, 2002, added “one-and-a-half-way” bridging, allowing implicit calls from Java to .NET.
8. The first commercial application using JNBridgePro pulled media advertising information from a Java-based system for a search engine company. A version of that application is still in use today.
9. The second commercial application using JNBridgePro enabled a financial call center to strip Java-based telephony information and pop it into .NET-based screens. That application has been performing flawlessly for almost 10 years.
10. We started bidding on “Java” and “.NET” keywords in Google AdWords in September.  .NET was so new that Google search didn’t know what to make of it yet, so our initial campaigns included lots of negative keywords such as fish and fishing.
11. Going to 11, ten years ago the JNBridge logo looked like this. Good grief!

JNBridge has had a presence at JavaOne every year for the last six years, from giving talks to exhibiting. They’ve been good years:  we’ve greatly appreciated and value the face-to-face conversations about solving real world problems. Back in 2005 we even got to hang out in Microsoft’s booth, and watch the shock and awe as hard-core Java developers witnessed fences starting to mend.

2010 brought a huge transition to JavaOne, as it morphed from its own event in the Moscone Center under the auspices of Sun to a satellite event of Oracle Open World, relegated to a rabbit warren of hotels around Union Square. Despite all the resulting downsides, we had a good show, as we got to engage with what became new customers and help them quickly solve their interoperability pain.

This year, the downsides have tipped the scale, and we decided to pull out. This decision wasn’t taken lightly — backing out of a commitment is a serious, angst-raising business around here. It wasn’t any single thing, but a whole lot of small things that pushed us away.

We don’t wish to sound snarky or petty, but little things matter, a lot. Despite signing on the dotted line to exhibit in 2011 at the 2010 show, we, like the rest of the world, were left in the dark to interpret bits of speculation in the media about whether JavaOne 2011 would even happen.  When it was announced last April, we were left to discover the news on the web — somehow we’d fallen off of the exhibitor email distribution list, and we stayed off.  When we finally woke up and realized what had happened, it was too late — the desirable hotels were booked, and the stress level of trying to get the team into decent housing was the final straw. This was on top of the hay pile of stuff we experienced last year. No media services: the media room was way off in the bowels of the Moscone Center, journalists and analysts either couldn’t find us or couldn’t fit the 15 minute trek uphill into their crowded schedules.

Other downsides weren’t exclusive to us, they impact all attendees. Relegating JavaOne to the outskirts of Oracle Open World forces it to be a bastard step-child — there’s no way a show of what’s now reduced to 3000 attendees can get the attention it deserves while competing for resources against a 40,000 attendee show. Many services, like extended registration hours and evening events, are that 15-minute walk away. The physical location is a rabbit warren – making both sessions and the exhibit floor difficult to find, so everyone struggles just to figure out where they are going. Gone are the chance confabs in the hall. Gone is the ability to walk up to anyone at the party and ask “so, what do you think?”, as in all probability are they are attending a very different event. We maintain that the Java community deserves better.

Finally, we recognize that we embarked upon a costly experiment some years ago. Would spending our resources and our time on trade shows be fruitful? It’s a tough and rather subjective thing to measure. In retrospect it was probably the right decision. But times have changed, and we now need to experiment with other ways to engage. Look for us in other venues in the coming months and quarters. If you have a preferred way of interacting, we’re all ears!

So, farewell JavaOne. We wish you, and the Java community, much success.

Addendum: Wayne Citrin, our CTO, will be wandering the halls the first two days. Give him a shout at @waynecitrin if you’d like to hook up.

We were at Microsoft’s Build conference in Anaheim a few weeks ago, where they unveiled their upcoming Windows 8 operating system.  In case you hadn’t caught the news, Windows 8 contains two distinct user experiences: a traditional “Desktop” experience which resembles Windows 7, and a new, touch-centric “Metro” experience.  The Desktop experience allows you to access the full .NET Framework as before; Metro applications run in a much more restricted runtime environment.

We’ve spent some time with Windows 8, and we’re happy to report that JNBridgePro, as it’s currently released, already works just fine with Windows 8 in desktop mode. So, if you’re already using JNBridgePro and want to move your application to Windows 8, or to create a new application for the Windows 8 desktop, JNBridgePro is as easy to use as always.

We’re also happy to report that the JNBridgePro plug-in for Visual Studio will work with the upcoming Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview with only minor changes, which will be incorporated in an upcoming JNBridgePro release.  This means that JNBridgePro will be ready for the new Visual Studio by the time VS 11 is released, and likely sooner.  In the meantime, if you want to use JNBridgePro in conjunction with VS 11 development, we recommend using the standalone proxy generation tool.  If you’d like to be a tester for the JNBridgePro plug-in for VS 11, please contact us.

As might be expected, Metro-style development, along with the more restrictive WinRT and new .NET Metro profile, offer a few challenges.  During the run-up to the Windows 8 release, we will be addressing those challenges.

We’d be interested to know whether any customers or prospective customers are planning to produce Metro apps, and whether they anticipate building .NET/Java interoperability into those applications.  If you are planning to produce such applications, we’d like to hear from you, and work with you, at this early stage in the Windows 8 product cycle — please contact us.

Over the coming months, we’ll periodically post new blog entries discussing interesting technical aspects of Metro and WinRT, as they affect interoperability.  We expect to learn a lot during this process, and we look forward to sharing it with you.

Whew! We’ve made our committed deadline: JNBridgePro version 6.0 is now available for download.

This new version supports Java/.NET interoperability projects where one or both of the end points are in the cloud. JNBridgePro 6.0 enables you to build and distribute integrated applications anywhere, including:

• Intra-cloud, where both end points reside in the same cloud, either in the same or separate instances
• Inter-cloud, where the instances belong to different clouds — even across cloud vendors
• Ground-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground, where one end point is in a cloud instance and the other is an application running on the ground

JNBridgePro 6.0 extends its full set of interoperability features from the ground to the cloud, so now you can build integrated applications that run anywhere. Read more details and check out some sample use case scenarios.

You may have recently seen a wee bit of press about our launch. As Michael Coté from RedMonk says: “There’s so much valuable data and process locked in Java and .Net applications that can’t just be left behind in whatever cloud-y future is out there – and refactoring all of that to be cloud friendly would be an onerous task. Instead, you need tools that help modernize those pools.”

Try it out for yourself! We’re eager to hear what you think.

Microsoft has been promoting the use of Java in the Azure cloud, and has been providing lots of material showing how it’s done. They’ve also been distributing Java tools for Azure, including an SDK for Eclipse, and an Azure accelerator for Tomcat. Their latest offering is the “Windows Azure Starter Kit for Java,”? which provides tools for packaging and uploading Java-based Web applications running on Tomcat or Jetty. In considering this, the main question that comes up is “Why?”?

It doesn’t work

“It doesn’t work”? is an extreme statement, isn’t it? And Microsoft has demonstrated that it can create Java Web apps and run them on Azure, so why do I say it doesn’t work? The problem is that these examples are extremely constrained. For example, Azure makes a virtue of its lack of a persistence mechanism. Instances can fail or restart at any time, which means that data isn’t persistent between instances, and applications therefore must not depend on persistent data. However, both Java Web applications and the servers they run on do depend on some sort of persistence or state. With effort, the applications can be re-engineered, but one has to wonder whether it’s worth the effort to do this, or whether the time might be spent moving to a different cloud offering where this re-engineering doesn’t need to be done. There’s also the problem that the Tomcat and Jetty servers themselves require persistent data to be stored. And the problem gets even worse when we go from a simple servlet container to a full-fledged application server like JBoss, WebLogic, or WebSphere: application servers, and the Java EE programs that run on them, rely even more deeply on persistent data. While some Java EE application servers can be altered to use alternative persistence mechanisms like Azure storage, the process is arcane to most Java EE developers and not worth the trouble; it would probably be simpler to use a cloud offering where the application server can be deployed without alteration.  In addition, a default application server relies on an extensive array of network endpoints for a variety of protocols that exceeds the number allowed by a worker role or a VM role. To run an app server on Azure, it is necessary to cut down the number of endpoints to the point where much useful functionality is lost. While it may be possible to construct Java EE examples that work as demos, it’s unlikely that any real Java EE apps, web-enabled or otherwise, can be migrated to the Azure cloud without drastic, impractical or impossible, modifications to the underlying application servers in order to accommodate the persistence and networking issues.

It’s not what users want

Beyond the technical issues in getting an app server running on the Azure platform, we need to ask why we would want to do this on a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) such as Azure, when it would be far simpler to run such an application on an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering like Amazon EC2. It’s one thing to say it can be done; it’s another thing to actually want to do it, as opposed to the easier alternatives. The market seems to bear this out – a recent Forrester study shows that Eclipse (that is, Java) developers prefer Amazon EC2 or Google App Engine, while Visual Studio (that is, .NET) developers prefer Windows Azure. Developers really don’t want to go through the contortions of packaging up their Java app plus the app server or servlet container, then configure and start it up as a special action under elevated privileges in an Azure worker role, just so that they can run Java EE, when they can easily install their application on a convenient Amazon EC2 image.

What users do want, it doesn’t do

Users will want to do things with Java on Azure, but not what the creators of the Azure Starter Kit for Java think they want to do. Rather than running a self-contained Java server in an Azure role (something they can more easily do elsewhere), they will want to integrate their Java with the .NET code more directly supported by Azure. For example, they may well have a Java library or application that they want to integrate with their .NET application. Depending on the Java side’s architecture, the Java might run in the same process as the .NET code, or it might run in its own process, or even a separate worker role. In any case, the Java side wouldn’t need to run in a full-fledged app server; it would simply expose an API that could be used by the .NET application.

A scenario like this is exactly the sort of thing that JNBridgePro supports. Java can be called from .NET code, and can run in the same process or in separate processes running on different machines. Up until now, those JNBridgePro deployments have been in on-premises desktop and server machines. In our upcoming JNBridgePro Cloud Edition, it will be just as straightforward to implement these interoperability scenarios in the cloud.

In summary, there’s a role for Java in the Azure cloud, but we think Microsoft is pushing the wrong scenarios. The Azure Starter Kit for Java is clever, but it (incompletely) solves a problem that cloud developers don’t have, while ignoring the real-world problems that cloud developers do have.

If you’ve been following JNBridge in the news, it’s no secret that we’ve been preparing a cloud offering. Over the last few months, we’ve learned a lot about what’s easy and not so easy to do on the various cloud platforms. But one thing that stands out is that cloud providers don’t seem to have devoted too much thought to how independent software vendors (ISVs) play in the cloud.

If you ask most people how software vendors can move into the cloud, they will say that the vendor should take their traditional products, put them in the cloud, and offer them as services. And that’s often fine. But what about software vendors like JNBridge who create components that other developers incorporate in their programs? In most cases, offering the component as a service doesn’t make sense.

The main challenge to running components like JNBridgePro in cloud-based programs has to do with prosaic but essential issues like licensing and billing. Windows Azure has absolutely no provision for third-party licensing (determining whether a user is entitled to use the product) and billing (charging for the use of the product). I would imagine that Microsoft feels that this should be the purview of some other third-party vendor, but I also imagine that potential vendors in this space are reluctant to invest in offerings until the demand materializes. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. If Microsoft is serious about their software partners producing for Azure (and not just end-user customers creating custom applications), they will have to jump-start the market themselves, by offering their own billing mechanism. Since they are already billing Azure users, this shouldn’t be a stretch.

Unlike Microsoft, Amazon does have a licensing and billing service, called DevPay, that allows third-party developers running on Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service to determine whether a user is authorized to run their products, and to charge for that use in a variety of ways. This service almost has it right, but it not quite there. It seems to be centered around Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service), but will not run with their more modern EC2 images that are backed by EBS (Elastic Block Storage), which is the mechanism that most current EC2 users employ. In addition, the DevPay documents do not seem to have been updated in several years, and many questions on the DevPay support forum have gone unanswered, which leads to questions about Amazon’s commitment to this service.

Don’t worry, we’ve gotten around this problem, and it’s not preventing us from coming out with our cloud-based offering. But it surprises me that this new frontier of the cloud does not seem to have been designed to accommodate software vendors who want their products to work in the cloud. One would think that barriers to entry wouldn’t be there, and that the cloud providers would do all they could to encourage software vendors to help settle this new frontier, but they haven’t. I’m particularly surprised that Microsoft, which, in almost all other areas goes out of its way to cultivate a thriving partner ecosystem, has not done that with Azure, and doesn’t seem to have thought through the issues that would encourage such an ecosystem. And without that robust partner community, cloud adoption will be that much slower for everyone.