Microsoft General Session: Taking Interoperability to the Next Level

"We come in peace, and we want to talk about interoperability today. Nothing is more important than interoperability."

Those were Steve Martin's first words in the Thursday morning general session titled Software + Services -- The Next Application Platform, where Microsoft's senior director of development platform product management demonstrated the work that Microsoft and Sun have been doing to make widespread application-level interoperability a reality.

Interoperability was the theme of Microsoft's first-ever general session at the JavaOne conference. The focus was on Sun's collaboration with Microsoft to help create a blended world in which all enterprise applications are highly interoperable across all platforms. Speakers Dan'l Lewin, corporate VP of strategic and emerging business development, and Steve Martin showed the Java community how Microsoft's .NET plays nicely with Java technology.

Dan'l Lewin, corporate vice president of Microsoft Corporation.

Thanks to the five-year partnership between Sun and Microsoft, a deep level of interoperability is now possible between .NET applications and Java applications in the middle tier. In an annual blind survey, Microsoft found that 73 percent of the developers that the company surveyed -- at least five million people -- use .NET or a combination of .NET and Java technology every day. Clearly, the world needs interoperability between the two stacks.

"Systems would naturally and definitively work together on behalf of the world of developers and customers who have the expectation that information belongs to them and should move freely among these different systems," said Lewin.

He noted that vendors have a mutual interest in providing a seamless experience to to their own customers as well as to customers of other vendors because almost all of them are working in complex, demanding mixed environments. Also, developers now expect that their middle-tier systems -- the "plumbing" -- will seamlessly and securely interoperate, and they'll get down to the real work of developing their interesting new Web 2.0 applications.

Harold Carr and Greg Leake, Sun and Microsoft engineers, respectively, gave a demonstration that showed just how easy interoperability could be. The two companies have been collaborating on code for the Apache project called Stonehenge. A set of example applications for service-oriented architecture (SOA), Project Stonehenge provides developers with practical guidance that makes it easier to use current industry standards to connect enterprise applications seamlessly. Together, Sun and Microsoft are building reference architectures that uses web services to "mix and match front-end, middle-tier, and back-end" services.

"Tested interfaces are much better than specs," said Steve Martin.

Project Stonehenge shows developers how to connect different applications running on different platforms, and it also shows you how to configure security settings. Developers can freely download these sample applications and repurpose them to write their own custom apps.

The speakers demonstrated an application called Stonehenge Stocktrader. It demonstrates SOA interoperability between GlassFish Metro and .NET.

The Stonehenge Stocktrader app has four layers: a user interface (UI), a business service, an order-processing service, and a database. Stocktrader uses the WS Message standard and performs encryption with X.509. The engineers' slides showed how one layer talks to the next in a vertical .NET stack. And when a Java stack is added, the two stacks can easily and securely communicate in the middle tier.

In the Stocktrader application, each platform can talk to the other platform for middle-tier interoperability. So the JSP web application's UI talks to the .NET 3.5 business service layer. Similarly, the .NET Smart client or ASP.NET web application UI talks to the Glassfish-Metro business service. Also, the two different business services can communicate with the other's order-processing service. Both platforms can be seen as clients by the other's services.

One thing really caught the attending developers' attention: You can make configuration changes in the business tier in the .NET stack in the Stocktrader app and have that change reflected in the same business tier in the GlassFish stack.

"Any tier can swap in Java or .NET and work seamlessly with no code changes," said Carr, Metro architect for Sun.

Sun announced in this general session that Sun and Microsoft are contributing their Stocktrader code to the Apache Stonehenge project. The goal is to encourage even deeper integration between the .NET and Java stacks. Lewin noted that this is just the beginning in the next phase of high-level integration and interoperability.

According to Lewin, the cloud is the next phase in the industry's evolution toward total interoperability. Applications running in the cloud must be fully accessible by users running different platforms, different languages, different coding environments, and different devices. Developers can count on these users having just one thing in common: a need for federated identities in their blended world.

Lewin lauded the oncoming cloud evolution: "Interoperability in a blended world [means that you] may move an application from a cloud to a regulated environment if you want to take it as is and redeploy locally.

"It gives developers more options. It's your application, your code, your choice in how to deploy it," said Lewin.

Sun has been collaborating with Microsoft for five years in three areas that are focused on interoperability: web security, Windows on Sun and Java technology on Windows, and web services. As a result, Sun is now a certified OEM Windows partner -- and Java applications, including the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and NetBeans tools, run seamlessly on Windows. Likewise, .NET supports Sun's Java SE JDK with the .NET Framework 2.0 SDK.

Together, the companies are working in multiple areas:

• Identity management, web single sign-on, and directory services
• Centralized systems management across mixed environments
• Desktop and system virtualization

"The intent and commitment is to make these systems work well together, and to drive interoperability and to drive cooperation," said Lewin.

» Watch the Video Replay: Software + Services -- The Next Application Platform
» Java Technology
» Microsoft .NET Framework
» Project Stonehenge at Apache
» Stonehenge Stocktrader
» GlassFish
» Metro
» General Session Schedule

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