JavaOne: Microsoft highlights interoperability

A keynote by Microsoft at the JavaOne conference? This came as quite a surprise to many of the participants. It seems that even Sun Microsystems itself was surprised, because the conference host neither mentioned the keynote nor Microsoft (who co-sponsored the event) in the printed edition of the "Conference Guide", although online news portals did cover the topic last week.

Microsoft executive Dan'l Lewin at JavaOne.
Source: java.sun.com Microsoft's Dan'l Lewin (Vice President of Strategic and Emerging Business Development) delivered a professional speech, dedicating the entire keynote to joint projects and the five years of partnership between Sun and Microsoft. The situation was most clearly described by Microsoft's Senior Director of Developer Platform Product Management Steven Martin, who alluded to past trench warfare when he said: "We come in peace and want to talk about (application) interoperability."

So, interoperability was the theme of the session. While it was still a "nice to have" years ago, in today's highly distributed system and application landscape interoperability has become a "must have", and represents one of the key components for the success of applications. Microsoft demonstrates that it's taking the topic seriously with its "Interoperability Bridges" portal, a central point of contact that promotes the interoperability between Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies: The Java community should be particularly interested in the Stonehenge Apache project. It consists of a set of applications that offer practical examples in the area of service-oriented architectures (SOA) across multiple platform technologies and languages.

At JavaOne, to show that it really works, Steve Martin and Harold Carr, Sun's engineering lead for enterprise web services, demonstrated the ".NET StockTrader Sample Application". The application allows Microsoft web services to be interoperable with Sun's Java-based Metro Web Services stack.

(Lars Röwekamp)

(crve)