At JavaOne, Microsoft Touts Fruits Of Interoperability

When bitter rivals stop fighting and start working together, great things often emerge from the thawing of relations. So it is with Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, who've been busily building bridges of interoperability between .Net and Java.

On Thursday at the JavaOne 2009 conference in San Francisco, Microsoft gave its first-ever keynote at the event, offering attendees a glimpse at how the two companies' relationship has evolved since their landmark 2004 technical collaboration agreement.

Dan'l Lewin, Microsoft corporate vice president for strategic and emerging business development, cited several examples of representative changes Microsoft has made with the express goal of increasing interoperability.

XML is now at the core of all Microsoft product development, and Jean Paoli, senior director of XML architecture and co-creator of XML, is a Microsoft employee. Microsoft's Geneva identity management platform, currently in beta, uses the XML-based Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) protocol to drive single sign-on access between different platforms, and also supports the Java-based OpenSSO project.

"The world we live in is all about interconnected systems," Lewin said. "We each invest billions in R&D, and I want to make it perfectly clear that the intent of this is interoperability for mixed environments."

Microsoft's work with the open-source community has led to unprecedented interoperability between Java and Windows as well as Web services, Lewin said.

Also taking part in the keynote was Steven Martin, senior director of developer platform product management at Microsoft, who gave an update on Microsoft's contributions to Stonehenge, an Apache Foundation project aimed at building reference architectures for applications to work across different platforms.

The point of Stonehenge is to provide practical guidance for using standards to connect enterprise applications, and the component-level interoperability that Microsoft and Sun have built into .Net and Java is helping to make that happen, according to Martin.

With 73 percent of the world's five million professional developers currently using .Net or a combination of .Net and Java on a daily basis, Microsoft and Sun are well-positioned as the cornerstones of next-generation application development, Martin said.

"We live in a blended world," Martin said. "The most critical aspect of enterprise applications is the ability to connect distributed systems."

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