Fastest way to share data objects between a Java server and a C# client

Question

What is the fastest way to share data structures between Java and C#? I want something where I can literally send a "car" object or a "foo" object and have it serialized and deserialized on both server and client.

Answer 1

Not necessarily applicable, but there's an interesting blog spot that I've seen about this topic: link text

Answer 2

You might be able to use IKVM, it's a Java-like environment on top of .NET; you could use Java serialization on IKVM and use interop to use the objects from "regular" .NET languages.

Answer 3

It looks like the IKVM seems like a good idea. But if that doesn't meet your needs especially since it is still in development. However, Uri's post points you in a good direction with the use of xml and passing messages, which can be built back together on either side.

Answer 4

Would you be able to use a SOAP web service on the server and have the client consume the web service? The object's data structure would be described in the WSDL for the web service.

Answer 5

WSDL (SOAP) is fairly interchangeable. If you want something less chatty, anything like Google's "protocol buffers", "ICE" (ZeroC), etc offer interchangeable binary serialization and code generation.

For .NET / C#, there are currently two viable protocol buffers implementations here; protosharp is essentially inactive and incomplete) - either would be fine, but neither currently has a complete RPC stack, so you'd have to handle message passing yourself.