One of Microsoft's brilliant ideas is to discontinue support for "legacy" tools people used mainly for building business applications. One of widely used is Visual Basic 6. Thanks to Wine, applications built on VB6 (we've tried so far) execute fine on Linux, except for the DCOM (COM+) servers, but that's another story.
Since MS abandoned this project lot of us got stuck with huge business critical "legacy" applications that are impossible to migrate to newer languages. At the same time innovations are constantly added to them raising dilemmas about which tool to use to introduce new features. One of the best options we found is to use Java-to-COM bridges and continue development in Java, while (very) slowly converting the "legacy" code too.
One bridge that works perfectly is JACOB. It uses JNI features of Java to build that bridge and everything works just fine - unfortunately, only on top of WINDOWS OS.
Since Wine has a great COM implementation, I wonder is there any way to construct "Java App -> JACOB -> JVM (JNI) -> WINE -> COM (VB6)" bridge ?
If this could be achieved (or something similar), we would not be needing windows at all. Now, since they are stopping support for XP, it could push even more users towards Linux and Open Source.
Java-to-COM bridge (JACOB) over WINE
Re: Java-to-COM bridge (JACOB) over WINE
https://launchpad.net/pipelight/
milano yes there is hacks to construct bridges. Pipelight is one of the most complete.
I think JACOB works on wine by using Windows java on wine. Yes performance overhead and more bugs.
Reality you should have asked this 12 months ago and maybe you could have avoided the hack solution. Why this is so hard. There was a project put on the table in 2006 http://wiki.winehq.org/WinePluginApi that would make what you after todo simple. Wine Plugin API section of the project has never received a backer to fund its development so its never developed.
Money does make open source go round. Gamers and normal desktop users have been the ones putting up most of the funds for wine to develop.
Reality here I know a lot of businesses are going to get themselves burnt by how limited wine is at supporting their internal applications. Businesses never mandated that the applications had to work on Wine/Linux.
These facts are the reality you are going to have to live with it now milano.
milano yes there is hacks to construct bridges. Pipelight is one of the most complete.
I think JACOB works on wine by using Windows java on wine. Yes performance overhead and more bugs.
Reality you should have asked this 12 months ago and maybe you could have avoided the hack solution. Why this is so hard. There was a project put on the table in 2006 http://wiki.winehq.org/WinePluginApi that would make what you after todo simple. Wine Plugin API section of the project has never received a backer to fund its development so its never developed.
Money does make open source go round. Gamers and normal desktop users have been the ones putting up most of the funds for wine to develop.
Reality here I know a lot of businesses are going to get themselves burnt by how limited wine is at supporting their internal applications. Businesses never mandated that the applications had to work on Wine/Linux.
These facts are the reality you are going to have to live with it now milano.
Re: Java-to-COM bridge (JACOB) over WINE
Thanks for the time you took to make this reply oiaohm.
Suposely we have JAVA/JACOB/COM in Wine (on its own stack) we would also need some application server to expose it to the outer world. That means we would have to run something like Tomcat or GlassFish under wine too. If that's even possible, the performance would really become an issue. Bugs too.
I can see how big this issue is. I guess it's much easier to run a local XP on KVM or whatever and use it as an application proxy for JACOB/COM services. New thing can be developed under Linux/Java, and the old ones will be used from this proxy. Since XP is available through internal network only, the lack of support is not an issue.
Perhaps, I could find a way to live with this. Thanks again.
Suposely we have JAVA/JACOB/COM in Wine (on its own stack) we would also need some application server to expose it to the outer world. That means we would have to run something like Tomcat or GlassFish under wine too. If that's even possible, the performance would really become an issue. Bugs too.
I can see how big this issue is. I guess it's much easier to run a local XP on KVM or whatever and use it as an application proxy for JACOB/COM services. New thing can be developed under Linux/Java, and the old ones will be used from this proxy. Since XP is available through internal network only, the lack of support is not an issue.
Perhaps, I could find a way to live with this. Thanks again.
