We all want to reduce costs and increase the productivity of development teams and we all face the same challenge, we have only 24 hours so we need tools that will help us be more efficient.

It's been many years since the first release of .NET and Java platforms. Today, we have around 10 million Java and 8 million .NET developers, and thousands of libraries, modules, frameworks, algorithms, drivers, SDKs and other assets based on these technologies being released every day. There are a lot of options to integrate two systems created with these two technologies but no way to directly mix their components in a single application. With progressing transition of JVM and CLR into open source, it seems inevitable that these worlds should merge.

Imagine the amount of effort that could be saved and the costs that could be reduced if developers could share any resources created with .NET and Java like they were built with single technology.

When you don't share resources, there is a high chance your teams are building the same components from the scratch over and over again to offer support for both platforms, or to access particular logic, data sources, modules or algorithms available on the market, purchased or developed within the company.

Make the Dream a Reality

Here at Javonet, we decided to face this challenge and make the vision of shared resources come true. Our technology has been on the market since 2013, but there are still many development teams and companies that are not aware that technology to address these issues already exists. We reported an 8-fold growth in sales last year, and we have just released the beta version of a cloud service that removes all remaining obstacles to achieve seamless integration.

Javonet.io is a brand-new, cloud-based solution built to bring your Java and .NET teams together. With a single PowerShell command or drag and drop of any .NET library into the browser window, developers can instantly make components available as pure Java packages and use all the logic implemented inside.

Let's look at the example of a .NET-based natural language processing (NLP) algorithm that took your .NET engineers two years to develop. Now they can simply push that .NET library through Javonet.io and get a Java package ready to provide the same functionality for any Java project. It can be your internal Java-based web application, a workflow system (i.e. one built on the Java-powered KNIME platform) or a library you want to offer to any external customer. This way, you can save two years of work involved in rewriting it for Java and still benefit from sharing that component, with the same functionality and the same performance, across different technology stacks.

Would you like to learn how to introduce that efficiency into your projects?

I'm sure you would.

That's why I want to show you a single step you can take in a few minutes to start sharing .NET artifacts with Java teams with no restrictions and no additional effort.

Boosting Collaboration in Five Minutes

Today you can convert .NET artifacts into Java Jar packages in five minutes as part of your CI/CD process. That what makes modern DevOps profitable!

Javonet.io can be used with a web browser or from your favorite command-line interface, such as PowerShell. You don’t need to install anything; you just need to run one command within the folder holding .NET resources, and after a short time, you will get Java packages ready to push into dependency repositories for Java teams.

With CLI access to the Javonet.io engine, you can very easily plug it into your continuous integration and continuous delivery processes. With two lines of code, each new release of the .NET artifact can be automatically converted into a Java Jar package just after it is compiled, and then pushed into Maven or Ivy.

No other solution on the market makes it possible to save hundreds of thousands of dollars with one command and five minutes like Javonet.io does.

Source of the Savings

Let's make a quick comparison calculation for that NLP algorithm mentioned above. Assuming the .NET implementation is done by two developers over two years and 0.5 allocations are kept to maintain the solution, the comparative time to reproduce it in Java should be about 50% shorter with gained knowledge and experience. At an hourly rate of $30 USD, the cost should look close to this:

Development = 2 (devs) * 1 (years) * 12 (months) * 160 (hours) * 30 USD = 115200 USD

Yearly Maintenance = 1 (dev) * 12 (months) * 80 (hours) * 30 USD = 28 800 USD /year

For a five-year project, this makes TCO around 230, 400 USD (one year of development plus four years of maintenance).

If you wanted to share the existing .NET implementation of that NLP algorithm with a Java application and run it on two servers, you could do that by pushing the .NET implementation through Javonet.io in five minutes and purchasing two Javonet Professional licenses. Your cost structure would be:

Development Cost = 0 USD

Javonet Cost = 2 (servers) * 468 USD = 936 USD / year

There is no development cost, and no time needed to recreate the code in Java or push it through any other channel. Therefore, you can compare Javonet costs directly to the maintenance costs of a custom solution. You can get a solution running instantly, minimizing time to market. The five-year TCO would be $4,680 USD!

Let's summarize:

Time Saving = 1 year

Cost Saving = 1- (4680 USD / 230 400 USD * 100) = 98% less!

Your savings could easily reach approximately $225,720 USD on a single project.

Step by Step Guide

Javonet technology allows calling both .NET from Java and Java from .NET. In the bare Javonet approach, you need to use our fluent API for Java Developers or .NET Developers API to access the foreign component.

However, if you plan to call .NET from Java you, can switch to our cloud-based service for generating strongly-typed Jar packages from any .NET DLL, which is called Javonet.io. In that case, you either use it through the browser or run this PowerShell command:

& (iex (curl javonet.services/run))

That's it! It will convert all DLLs in the current directory into Java packages.

Call it from the output directory for .NET artifacts and boost productivity.

Use Cases

We have already considered tens of use cases, but our customers still keep surprising us. The application of Javonet technology and Javonet.io cloud services can be as wide as the application of software programming.

Let me know in the comments if you think of any interesting use case not mentioned in this article.

Physical Devices

The most frequent scenarios involve access to physical devices. Companies producing sensors, cameras, bar code readers, healthcare utilities creating the SDKs or drivers in .NET can make them accessible from Java without any further investment by appending Javonet.io as the last step of their build process.

HMI and SCADA

Real-time processing, sharing UI components, embedding visualizations or doing high-performance reads of data from sensors are daily processes in HMI and SCADA environments. Javonet allows the integration of any solutions mixed between .NET and Java, enabling you to create comprehensive dashboards and user interfaces and load them in a single application.

UI Components Vendors

One of the early adopters of Javonet.io is an amazing .NET based toolset for charting called List & Label from combit. With our technology and strongly-typed Java wrappers, combit can double its potential market and reach all Java-based customers with its great components by making a small change in its DevOps scripts.

"You have a really good technology there." - Daniel Paepke, IT Specialist at combit

Backend Components and Algorithms

Whatever can be used with .NET security encryption algorithms, OCR, fingerprint readers, route optimization AI, NLP or modules for executing trades in financial institutions can be shared with Java developers the same way. This can boost your teams' productivity and let you share tons of resources as if there were no boundaries between these programming languages.

Eager to Try but Scared or Concerned?

Companies, especially those in healthcare, defense, manufacturing or finance, are usually scared of a third-party component dependency and licensing/activation challenges.

With Javonet, we address these issues as well. With rapid growth each year more business-critical solutions run on our technology, proving its reliability. But trust is not enough for us. We want to offer documented technical confidence that there are no additional business risks.

Our activation model allows for compile-time activation, so the license is being checked only during the compilation of your solution. There will be no calls or expiry issues in production. The target server can be fully offline. Moreover, we are offering a 180-day grace period for built servers, to guarantee business continuity in case of formal license renewal delays. We are also providing access to source code through escrow, with activation free version of the component that would be released in case of any business risk putting us out of operation.

Bottom Line

Expand your strategy for seamless integration by appending one command into your DevOps process and boosting your .NET and Java teams’ collaboration with Javonet.io. With this amazing solution, you can save tons of hours, shorten the time to market of your solution, and re-use a lot of resources either created internally or obtained as a third-party dependency. These can be legacy components or the latest state-of-the-art algorithms.

Converting .NET DLLs into Java packages can be done at big enterprises and small startups alike, either to quickly share required modules, offer your solution to broader markets, or just let developers choose the right technology for a particular activity and remove all the issues with integrating them.

Feel free to share your thoughts, interesting use cases or any other feedback in the comments to help us make Javonet.io even more aligned with your needs!

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Przemyslaw is a long term entrepreneur, software architect, and integrations expert. He is Vice President at SdNcenter the leading offshore software house focused on integrations, healthcare, and monitoring. Also, he is Chief Technology Officer at Javonet the worldwide leading native integration technology for .NET and Java. Przemyslaw is great fun of aviation, economy, green energy, and technology innovations supporting governmental projects for the export of Polish technologies to support the transition of humanity into a clean energy world with no barriers.

You can connect with him directly on LinkedIn or leave comments below the article.