Mainsoft on Tuesday is launching a product that supports Microsoft's ASP.Net AJAX technology on Java-supported platforms such as Linux.

Through Mainsoft for Java EE version 2.2, Visual C# and Visual Basic developers can use ASP.Net 2.0 components from Microsoft to build Java pages with sophisticated user interfaces and client-server communications, Mainsoft said. Developers can add server controls to ASP.Net applications. Ported applications offer equivalent performance on Java as the original application.

Mainsoft has invested more than $14 million technology to make ASP.Net run cross-platform, the company said. With the 2.2 release, developers can use Microsoft's Visual Studio development environment and ASP.Net AJAX to develop enterprise applications and deploy them on Windows or Java EE (Enterprise Edition) servers or both. They can be run on Linux as well.

"We take .Net source code to Java byte code," said Yaacov Cohen, Mainsoft president. "By doing that, we are actually extending the Java platform by bringing the Visual Basic and C# languages to the Java platform." Developers can use existing .Net skills.

Mainsoft ASP.Net AJAX extensions allow developers to build ASP.Net AJAX-enabled Web applications and port existing Web applications to run natively on Tomcat and IBM WebSphere application server.

Also featured in version 2.2 are algorithms that optimize conversion of numbers to strings. Because Internet protocols such as XML and HTML are text-based, software programs must spend a lot of time converting numbers to text and text to numbers. Performance tests by Mainsoft indicate the combined algorithms make .Net conversion speeds 40 to 260 percent faster and deliver three times the conversion speed of equivalent Java APIs.

Mainsoft for Java EE is the result of a collaboration with the Novell-run Mono project, which provides an open source implementation of Microsoft .Net technologies.