Open Source J# Reborn As Ja.NET

Commercially I develop contracted software for clients based on the .NET platform, and C#. During my ‘free time’ I work on an application based on Java technologies (Java, Spring, Hibernate, and GWT). Sometimes I wish I could use one language for both my .NET and Java development. In the past this lead me to consider using J# for some of my .NET development, but somehow I never got around writing anything in J#. I finally lost all interest when Microsoft dropped J# from the .NET framework. So it was with great interest that I watched the rebirth of an open source J#, called Ja.NET.

Ja.NET is Java 1.5 Standard Edition (J2SE) that compiles MSIL for .NET. Ja.NET is derived from the Apache Harmony JVM. What this means is that all code written for Ja.NET can be compiled to .NET MSIL or Harmony Java bytecode. So far the developers have successfully built and ran JUnit, Xerces, Ant, and other OSS on .NET without any code changes to those distributions. Pretty neat!