Java and C# interoperability

Question

I am author of jni4net, open source interprocess bridge between JVM and CLR. It's build on top of JNI and PInvoke. No C/C++ code needed. I hope it will help you.

Kyle has the right approach in asking about the interaction. There is no "correct" answer without knowing what the usage patterns are likely to be.

Any architectural decision -- especially at this level -- is a trade-off.

You must ask yourself:

• What kind of messages need to be passed between the systems?
• What types of data need to be shared?
• Is there an important requirement to support complex model objects or will primitives + arrays do?
• what is the volume of the data?
• How frequently will the interactions occur?
• What is the acceptable communication latency?

Until you have an understanding of the answers, or potential answers, to those questions, it will be difficult to choose an implementation architecture. Once we know which factors are important, it will be far easier to choose the more suitable implementation candidates that reflect the requirements of the running system.

I've heard good things about IKVM, the JVM that's made with .NET.

Ice from ZeroC is a really high performance "enterprisey" interop layer that supports Java and .net amongst others. I think of it as an updated Corba - it even has its own object oriented interface definition language called Slice (like Corba's IDL, but actually quite readable).

The feature set is extensive, with far more on offer than web services, but clearly it isn't an open standard, so not a decision to make lightly. The generated code it spits out is somewhat ugly too...