Reason #15: Magic xpa Surpasses C# in Interoperability for .NET

20 Reasons to Migrate Magic eDeveloper, uniPaaS and Magic xpa to .NET by Upgrading Rather than Converting

The Magic xpa Application Platform is a particularly strong platform in terms of interoperability of applications. While C# .NET is designed to be proprietary, Magic xpa Application Platform, while .NET based, is designed to deliver greater interoperability. This is one of many reasons why converting a Magic eDeveloper, uniPaaS or Magic xpa application to .NET in C# using a code generator makes no sense. 

Developers looking for fully .NET applications should instead upgrade to Magic xpa.

That’s why Magic xpa provides direct support for technologies like Java, SNMP, MSMQ, JMS, WebSphere MQ, LDAP, Active Directory, Java Script, VB Script, Client Certificates, Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), IMAP, POP3, etc. All of these internal Magic xpa functions provide direct support for technologies that are otherwise quite difficult or impossible to support with C#.NET. 

The ability of a single programming environment to interface with so many different, unique and tedious environments at a high-level provides tremendous advantages, reduces risk and helps to future-proof your applications. For example, Magic xpa provides direct  Java support including support for Java classes and objects called in a Magic application and Magic applications exposed as Java classes and objects for use by Java programs. 

The idea that C# can handle a converted Magic application is ludicrous. Sometimes developers have no choice but to deal with older technologies like DDE. So even though you might be able to convert your code, without the Magic engine, there is no automatic way for raw C# to handle DDEs.

Let’s look at another simple example like SNMP. Magic xpa supports Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) functionality. This lets Magic xpa programs and the Magic xpa engine (the broker and the requester) send SNMP compliant messages to a monitor. It also gives the system administrator control over various Magic xpa modules via an SNMP monitor.

SNMP governs network management and monitors network devices and their functions. Magic xpa is SNMP enabled, so the Network Management Station (NMS), also referred to as an SNMP monitor, can query and manage the Magic xpa broker (including its registered enterprise servers) and the Magic xpa broker can report traps (alarms, failures, or other exceptional events).

Messaging is another great example of Magic’s superior interoperability compared to C#. In distributed applications, two different applications often need to communicate with one another to transfer information. One of the ways to accomplish this is message queuing, which ensures guaranteed delivery.

Message queuing lets applications send messages without waiting for a reply and to continue with other processes. Other applications can receive the messages at their leisure and continue processing according to the data received.

Message queuing is a method by which program instances can exchange data using an interface to a system-managed message queue, which is managed by the operating system. Application programs create message queues, and send and receive messages using an application program interface (API).

There are two main ways to send messages:

Send / Receive – This is used when there are one or more senders who want to send messages to one receiver. Each message is addressed to a specific queue, and the receiver extracts the message from the queue.

Publish / Subscribe – This is used when there are multiple senders (publishers) and many receivers (subscribers). The publisher sends messages to a central location, the topic, which sends the messages to anyone who has subscribed to this specific topic.

Both of these methods provide the user with guaranteed message delivery and are supported out-of-the-box with Magic xpa. Not so with C#.

Every access to the message queue is done using a set of functions, such as open, close, and send. Magic xpa provides a message queuing component with interfaces to three standard messaging queue systems: MSMQ (Microsoft), JMS, and WebSphere MQ (IBM). C# does a passable job only with MSMQ.

For additional information on how an upgrade to Magic xpa is superior to Magic to .NET conversion please convert here.

A Smarter Way to Do Asynchronous Programming

The cover of MSDN Magazine this month carries the main headline: “Asynchronous programming.” Inside you will find three articles about these new proposed features that will make it easier to write code that will help to create efficiencies in Visual Studio applications for asynchronous programming.

The entire article is about how it will be possible in the future to write code that does what the Magic application platform has been doing automatically for its programmers for more than 10 years. Visual Basic and C# don’t have these capabilities yet, but they will in the future the articles proclaim, but it will still require the developer to add special code and the creators of these languages are so far away from a solution that they are using the magazine to solicit feedback on the idea. Wow.

I think it is easy for those of us familiar with uniPaaS seamless efficiency through multithreaded concurrent architecture to forget that other developers must tell their programs how to handle concurrency of task execution. I remember being very impressed with the initial analogy used to explain the Magic engine and the Magic broker: the example used was that of a restaurant with many waiters and a short order cook or cooks who were working on many meals in parallel, breaking down the meal preparation into discrete steps and jumping back and forth between tasks. 

At Magic Software, we talk a lot about how our advantage is a metadata driven architecture, but when you read the articles in this month’s MSDN Magazine it crystallizes some of the low-level nonsense that other developers put up with every single day without realizing that it Is a complete waste of time for them to be creating business applications in those languages (and don’t get me wrong, Java is no better). The sad thing for these developers is that they have to add lots of instructions to their code to tell the program how to process tasks concurrently. Really, in 2011 programmer drones are paid six figure salaries and still writing the same code concepts over and over again? 

Thankfully, there is a smarter way to do asynchronous programming and achieve highly efficient applications without giving it a second thought. That approach is found in Magic Software’s uniPaaS application platform. Even after Microsoft finishes its "enhancements" to C# and Visual Basic (tough luck if you're using a different Microsoft language) you will still have to manually add "await" instructions to your code. And since there was no thought put into forward-migration and everyone handled concurrency differently, you will have to manually strip out all the old concurrency code. Yuck! The three articles were nice, very enlightening as to the tedium on the other side of the fence, but as for me: here’s three cheers for uniPaaS!

To see a sample business application running in Magic Software's uniPaaS application platform see the RIA demo here. To read more about Magic Software's smarter application platform, see the information on the company website.