Merging programs of different languages

I have three programs (one in C++ + WinAPI, another one 开发者_Python百科in C# .NET and the last one in Java) with different functions. I am about to choose one and implement functions of the other two. Is it possible to somehow merge them? I need to have them in one GUI, under one process (at least visually). IPC isn't a problem.

Thanks for anything

I think the best/easiest thing you could do is make the GUI only in C#, in windows clients you could use Windows Forms or WPF, in web based you can use ASP.NET WebForms or ASP.NET MVC.

in all these cases except MVC (Razor) you have really good tools for designing and customizing the GUI within Visual Studio.

Your C++ code can be wrapped in a class library or as you say accessed via some kind of IPC if it has to run as application, same for Java but if you are 100% free to write and re-write things you could also imagine to port the Java code to C++, this could be easy, difficult or impossible depending on what the java code does.

at last resort if both C++ and Java applications must stay separated and must run in background on same or another machine and you still want to consume their services or methods from your C# GUI, as you mentioned, IPC is probably the way, not sure what you can do in Windows with Java and IPC, surely java can expose or consume XML web services.

The problem you will find is that each has its own process model, and you either need to get the process models to coexist or you'll need several communicating processes (though the user need not see them). With Java, eg, it can be "king", or you can set up a sort of sub-process in another process, or you can have it set up/take down its process model on every call. Which approach is best depends in part on the complexity of the operations you'll be doing in the "guest" language.

The one main thing, though, is that only one language can control the UI -- in general different language UIs don't coexist, and I doubt that you can have eg, a Java UI object in a C# GUI, at least not without treating it as a foreign window.

If you're talking about the best language to rewrite the programs in, that depends entirely on the primary function. If you mainly need it to integrate with Windows nicely, C# would be the obvious choice. If your main idea is to make it cross-platform, it'd make most sense in Java.

If you're talking about running them together and using IPC then yes, that's possible too - you could use anything from a fully blown IPC framework to a custom protocol over sockets on localhost. There shouldn't be too much of an issue there, though remember depending on how big the parts in other languages are, it may cost just as much in terms of time to rewrite them (and there's less of a maintenance burden that way too.) There's also complexities with controlling GUIs from other processes, it can be done ish by passing native canvas IDs around cross process, but it's hard to get working properly, may not be particularly safe and makes it quite difficult to work out what's going on from a maintenance perspective.