Lately, much of the action in the Java world has been in the development and use of non-Java languages that run on the JVM. That’s why we were pleased to hear from a customer who wanted to use JNBridgePro to call .NET assemblies from code written in Groovy.

For those of you unaware, Groovy is a dynamic language that runs on the JVM. Groovy classes compile to Java binary .class files, and Groovy code can call (and be called from) any conventional Java class. In our customer’s case, they wanted to call .NET classes from Groovy, which really meant calling proxies. Since proxied .NET classes are just Java classes, everything should just work, and it did.

It’s really easy to illustrate how this is done. Let’s assume we have a very simple test class written in C#:

namespace GroovyTestDotNetSide
{
   public class SimpleObject
   {
      public SimpleObject(int i)
      {
         Console.WriteLine("In SimpleObject.ctor: value supplied is " + i);
      }
   }
}

First, we proxy it and generate a proxy jar file proxies.jar. Now, if we create a Groovy project and include proxies.jar in the build classpath, along with jnbcore.jar, bcel-5.1-jnbridge.jar (all of which would be included in any Java-to-.NET project using JNBridgePro), and groovy-all-1.7.5.jar (or something similar, depending on which version of Groovy is being used), we can write Groovy code to instantiate SimpleObject:

import GroovyTestDotNetSide.SimpleObject
import com.jnbridge.jnbcore.DotNetSide

class SimpleTest {

   static main(args) {

   // set up JNBridge
   DotNetSide.init(args[0])

   def simpleObject = new SimpleObject(3)

   println "Done!"
}
}

Just as in a conventional Java-to-.NET project, you need to initialize the Java side through a call to DotNetSide.init(), supplying the path to the Java-side properties file, or an equivalent Properties object. Once that is done, you can make any valid call to a proxy. In this case, we instantiate SimpleObject, but we can also call static or instance methods of SimpleObject, or access SimpleObject fields or properties or events.

Once the project is build, you will have a binary file SimpleTest.class, and you can run the application in the usual way (assuming all the jar, .class, and .properties files are in the current folder):

java -cp “proxies.jar;jnbcore.jar;bcel-5.1-jnbridge.jar;groovy-all-1.7.5.jar;. ” SimpleTest props.properties

The properties file can configure for tcp/binary, http/soap, or shared memory; if you are using tcp/binary or http/soap, you will or course need to run a properly configured .NET side.

As you can see, this just works in exactly the same way you’d expect if you were using Java.

While we have not yet tried it, interoperability with Groovy should also work in the .NET-to-Groovy direction. Similarly, JNBridgePro should also work when integrating .NET with other JVM-based languages like Scala, JRuby, and Jython.

Are you thinking about using JNBridgePro with JVM-based languages other than Java? If so, let us know in the comments or by sending us email at info@jnbridge.com.