The Five Most Viewed JNBridge Blog Posts of 2017

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It’s always interesting to look at the list of our most popular blog posts. It gives us a window into what’s most important for our users, as well as what’s important for members of the wider community who might one day become our users. We’d like to share with you the list of the five most viewed blog posts on the JNBridge website in 2017.

The Legacy Developer’s Guide to Java 9. This was by far our most popular blog post of the year, and we’re quite proud of it. Clearly it addressed a need in the community that wasn’t being addressed anywhere else. In 2017, there was plenty of content on the many new features of Java 9, but almost nothing on how the many developers who maintain legacy Java code can make use of these features. The topic was of enough interest that we were able to present it as a birds-of-a-feather at JavaOne last year. Even though the talk was scheduled at the end of the day, it was well-attended, which further confirms the breadth of interest in the topic. You can download slides for the talk here.

Serializing and Deserializing Java Objects from a .NET Program. This is a fairly technical post covering a common interoperability problem. While one can implement Java object serializers and deserializers in .NET (the formats are available if you look for them), it’s pretty complicated. Far simpler is to just leverage Java’s perfectly fine serialization APIs from .NET using JNBridgePro. I’d also like to point out another, somewhat older, post on serialization issues. It includes a discussion of a rather obscure, but extremely useful, mechanism in .NET called serialization surrogates, that allows you to serialize and deserialize objects that may not otherwise be serializable.

Java/Excel (and Other Office) Interoperability. I find this one extremely interesting. It’s over 10 years old, but it consistently appears among our most-viewed blog posts. We’d be very interested in the scenarios that motivate finding this blog post. Are the readers looking for ways to create, read, and manipulate Excel files from Java applications? Or are they looking at Word or PowerPoint files? There are third-party tools that perform these functions. (You can easily find them with an online search, but I am not going to link to them here.) Are these tools more expensive than a JNBridgePro-based solution, or do they lack some necessary functionality? If you have some insights into these questions, contact us. We’d love to hear more.

Creating WCF Services Using the .NET JMS Adapter – Part 1. Here’s a highly technical post describing how to use our JMS adapter for .NET in the context of a WCF service. You won’t find that kind of information anywhere else but our website. This article describes implementing outbound operations (i.e. publishing JMS messages to a JMS server from IIS). The follow-on article (Part 2), shows how to implement an inbound operation (i.e. consuming JMS messages by IIS). Presumably, the former scenario is more common than the latter.

Accessing Java Messaging Service (JMS) from .NET. This is another decade-old post that’s still highly popular. From early on, our customers have let us know that .NET/JMS integration has been one of their most frequent interoperability scenarios. Eventually, that led to our introduction of the JMS adapters so that users could send and receive JMS messages without having to be familiar with the JMS APIs. But there are clearly still scenarios where users prefer to “roll their own” using JNBridgePro. We are happy to provide advice, although I suspect that many prospective users who arrive at that post through a web search end up using one of our JMS adapters rather than using JNBridgePro to implement it themselves.

Here are the next five most viewed posts:

It’s clear that our most popular content contains technical information that solves specific problems and isn’t available anywhere else. We’ll do our best to continue providing unique and important technical content to our readers. Let us know if there are any subjects you’d particularly like us to discuss in the coming year.