How I Learned To Love J#

This technology is condemned as heresy in some circles. A friend of mine even declared it an abomination. When words like heresy and abomination start cropping up, I know the objections are more religious than technical.

The impious, godless blasphemy? J#. Pronounced 'J Sharp' - It's a .NET technology that looks a lot like Java 1.1, so much so, that it runs most Java 1.1 code. We had a large codebase in Java and wanted it to run under .NET. There was some work to be done with getting it running under J# - for various reasons, I had to factor out all the code dealing with JPEG files and Zip streams. Some methods of Java objects just didn't seem to be there, and there are more bugs in the J# libraries than you'd see with the much more widely used Java. But after working though those problems, now we've got a single codebase that compiles both in Java and in .NET - and that's a big win.

For our .NET install - we could have just asked the user to install the Java runtime and then called out to an external process to do the compilation. But there's two big problems with that - a) the installation becomes a lot more complex b) the application feels like a patchwork. It's so much nicer if an application lives and breathes the OS that it's running on. That's what J# gave us without having to rewrite everything.

Posted by Alexander at September 28, 2005 01:38 PM

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