Running JBoss in .NET runtime with IKVM

[ivelin.ivanov]

Turns out it's very easy to run JBoss within .NET runtime.
1) Download ikvm
2) In JBoss' run.bat replace java.exe with ikvm.exe

The JBoss microkernel starts without any errors.
The default JBoss configuration prints "ZipFile has closed" errors when it tries to deploy archives copied to the tmp directory.

With the IKVM dll it is easy for C# programs to use Java APIs.
http://www.ikvm.net/devguide/net2java.html

Provided the errors mentioned above can be fixed, what does it mean to run JBoss within .NET runtime?

Do .NET developers gain a full featured Professional Open Source middletier container? Can it possibly match the .NET enterprise services. JMS vs MSMQ, JTA vs MSTM, EJB3 vs. ADO,...?

Any thoughts?

[acoliver]

I posted on this over a year back and everyone else thought it was a dumb idea :-(. Last time I checked there were still hangups after the initial boot (classloader issues). We need deployers for .NET codebased. I'm not 100% sure we'll be able to JBossAOP intercept stuff written in C#. We might be able to create Java classes for .NET classes and then proxy the calls. The created Java object could then be intercepted, but we couldn't do arbitrary pointcuts (mid method). Still it wouldn't be a bad feature set. There are still problems with the gnu classpath version of RMI and though I haven't checked I imagine using Sun's in IKVM/.NET would not be license kosher. It should be relatively easy to write .NET interceptors for Java objects.

I suggest as a start:

DNEJBDeployer - deploy Dot Net classes which expose and use EJB interfaces/etc.
DotNetDeployer - deploy .NET POCSOs
DNAOPDeployer - deploys .NET interceptors

Can you imagine how wicked it would be for JBoss to be the first J2EE certified appserver for .NET? Think of how great it would be to bring the JBoss platform to the masses of VB and other .NET developers? Meaning what if you could use M$ dev tools to write stuff and deploy it on JBoss? I think that would kick ass personally.

Is it viable biz wise? I can't say for sure, but I bet it is.

Back to earth, IKVM (and Mono for that matter) are still in their infancy but this kind of thing would probably help change that pretty quickly. It might also give us a VM that we could really extend, tweak and fix irritating bugs in. I'm kinda sick of Sun letting serious bugs go unfixed for several years...