Michael Dolan Dot Com

Monday, November 19th, 2007

IBM Partners with Mainsoft to bring .NET apps to WebSphere Portal (and Linux)

The title says it all. I’m pleased to see the press releases have hit the wires (even though some may argue press releases are in the past). IBM customers can now purchase Mainsoft’s .NET Extensions for WebSphere Portal to start integrating their .NET based Windows applications into IBM WebSphere – which gives users the flexibility to deploy on any OS platform that WebSphere runs on (I prefer to say Linux).

I’ve worked with the team at Mainsoft for a while now and am pleased to see this relationship has moved another step closer. The ability to remove the middleware lock-in associated with the Microsoft programming model is exceptionally helpful for many users – especially those with volumes of .NET assets in their company.

If you haven’t tried out Mainsoft before, you can also use their ‘free’ tool called Grasshopper. You can download Grasshopper here: http://dev.mainsoft.com/

What the Mainsoft tools let you do is add a plug-in for Visual Studio into your IDE. You basically open up your .NET app and then publish it to a WebSphere (or other Java app server) using the usual VS.NET process. It’s really that easy. In the background, VS compiles your .NET code into intermediate .NET bytecode, then Mainsoft kicks in and translates the bytecode to Java bytecode, wraps up the code into JAR/WAR files to deploy on the server. You might think it’s “magic”, but it’s real – and customers are using it to break free from the Microsoft lock-in (some even on Mainframes – how crazy is that?).

Congratulations to Mainsoft and the IBM Portal team who have turned a successful relationship into one built for volume and scale.