[Mono-devel-list] Alternatives to SOAP for tightly integrating C# and Java?

[George Hawkins]

Hi there --

I was wondering if any of you had any thoughts on options for
integrating C# and Java systems?

At the moment the only ready to go solution seems to be SOAP but somehow
SOAP seems a poor match when really what you want is a very tight
coupling between code written in Java and code written in C#.

When I looked at this problem first I thought about:

1. CORBA.
2. A Java implementation of .NET remoting.
3. A C# implementation of Java RMI.

It was only after trying to look for solutions based around there ideas
that I fell back on SOAP.

While I found a few products such as JnBridge, iHub and Ja.NET that
attack the problem by providing a mechanism for Java to work with .NET
remoting I couldn't find anything in the open-source domain.

I had even less luck with CORBA - I naively assumed Microsoft would be
providing CORBA bindings for their .NET languages like C# but this
doesn't seem to be the case.

Similarly I didn't come across anybody trying to get RMI to work with
C#, either commercial or open-source based.

Have I missed anything - or is this a good summary of the state of
things at the moment?

I did like the look of Intrinsyc's implementation of .NET remoting for
Java and it is reasonably priced (at least when used with J2SE - it's
much more expensive to use with J2EE) but while I'm not a strict
open-source ideologue I do much prefer to go for solutions where I can
look at the source.

While quite recent, I wonder if Lluis Sanchez's super work on .NET
remoting will provide a basis from which to build an open-source
implementation of .NET remoting for Java? Have people already been
looking at this?

SOAP, CORBA, remoting and RMI - are there other options to examine?

Any thoughts or suggestions would be much appreciated.

Best wishes - yours,


George.

PS sorry if you feel this is inappropriate to the development group, I
posted here as I didn't get the feeling there was already an open source
solution to what I was thinking about and as such it'd be more the
subject of future development - something Mono developers might already
have been thinking about or working on.