[Mono-list] Mono quotes from a Sun evangelist

Stefan Matthias Aust sma@3plus4.de
Sat, 29 Mar 2003 13:37:35 +0100


Thong (Tum) Nguyen wrote:
> Has there been interest in creating a J2EE style architecture for
> C#/.NET?  We can make it "better" because we can make the beans self
> describing using attributes.  No need for XML descriptors :D.

Shouldn't be that difficult.  Most if not all of the stuff is based on 
the servlet API and the idea of a standardized application server 
servlet container plugin-API.  The servlet idea a s pretty simple but 
clever way to interface with web pages which has proven to be easy to 
learn and quite usable.

Based on that, Sun gave us JSPs - the same old idea as PHP where you 
inject source code into HTML code.  JSPs are compiled into servlets, that is

  <html>bla <% int a = 0; %>

is wrapped inside-out

  print("<html>bla ");
  int a = 0;

ASP works probably quite the same.  Of couse, the JSP standard growed 
with the time and because the older versions never got it right.  JSP 
2.0 is on the horizont and will come with its own simpler-to-use 
expression language.  Another concept of JPSs are taglibs where you can 
write pluggable code that gets executed if the JSP engine hits a custom 
tag like <when>.

Based on this foundation, productivity frameworks like struts or all 
other webapp-frameworks are created.  And of course based on XML because 
everybody seems to think, that large complicated configuration files 
with XML syntax must be a good idea cause anybody else does it, too.

Whatever, this track of J2EE should hide no hidden traps of complexity.

For EJBs - if you want them - you basically need something like RMI - 
.NET remoting should do fine here - and the time and endurance to create 
an EJB application server.  JBoss is an open sourced one.  As it worked 
quite will in pure Java, of course you could port it to C#.  You could 
even have your Java clients talk to that server because the ways the EJB 
standard is defined.

More realistic, it might be possible, you have C# clients to talk to a 
Java-EJB-Appserver.  You need an RMI and/or Corba/IIOP protocol though 
that also supports Java serialization.  Everthing is standardized, you 
just need to implement it.  And - in opposite to Microsoft who even 
wants to patent the .NET API - you're allowed to do so.

My preference would be to have something like servlets as I really like 
this technology.  I don't care much for JSP and at least 80% of all 
projects don't need the overhead of EJBs.  It would be nice to lever 
existing Java technology knowledge to C#.


bye
-- 
Stefan Matthias Aust   //
www.3plus4software.de // Inter Deum Et Diabolum Semper Musica Est