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.

We’ve posted the transcript for our interview on Connected Show! Episode 11, “JNBridge – Spanning Java & .NET” (the transcript starts about 27 minutes in). Peter Laudati, a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft, interviewed Wayne Citrin, CTO of JNBridge, at JavaOne. They talk about connecting Java and .NET applications using JNBridge. It’s just magic!