Microsoft drops in on JavaOne

By David Worthington

June 4, 2009 — SAN FRANCISCO — The holy war is over. Microsoft today delivered its first-ever keynote here at JavaOne, acknowledging the prevalence of heterogeneous systems in enterprise IT environments and demonstrating the interoperability work Microsoft is doing with Sun to bridge their platforms.

Nearly a decade ago, Microsoft believed that the "Java threat" could undermine its Windows franchise, and it used its influence to "take mindshare away from Sun," according to Microsoft internal documents from the time.

Microsoft’s Dan’l Lewin, vice president of strategic and emerging business development, gave a general overview of the work that has been happening though engineering exchanges between Microsoft and the Java community, in addition to the work that it does in its interoperability labs.

Steven Martin, senior director of developer platform product management at Microsoft, followed up by showcasing the company's open-source StockTrader 2.0 reference application, and by demonstrating Java and .NET implementations interoperating between tiers.

"We have done a great job as an industry by most accounts in creating lots and lots of specifications in how things could talk to one another, but customers are saying that they need actual code-based implementations. Sample code shows how to write against a spec in open and compliant way," Martin said in an interview.

A recent Microsoft professional developers study found that 73% of respondents rely on either .NET or a blend of Java and .NET, he told SD Times.

"Both .NET and Java have won in the enterprise. Winning collectively means Microsoft and Sun have an obligation to ensure that they are delivering interoperability as a primary scenario," he added.

Specifications will continue to evolve, and the companies will continue to write reference applications, he said. "Customers will have a low tolerance for proprietary [standards] implementations in the cloud."

Martin said that the computation layer, storage layer and Windows Azure services are all Web-addressable, making it possible for customers to think about componentization of technology from the very beginning.

As first reported by SD Times, Aisling MacRunnels, vice president of Application Platform Software at Sun, announced Sun's participation in the Apache Stonehenge project, which is made up of companies and developers seeking to test the interoperability of Web standards implementations.

Microsoft donated StockTrader to Stonehenge in January. Along with Microsoft, Apache, Red Hat and WSO2 are already participating in the project.

Related Search Term(s): Java, Microsoft, Sun

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Sun releases JavaFX 1.0 for Web development
Sun's platform may be Java's ticket into the RIA world, and it features the first native Java video codec. The company hopes that it will be able to supplant its two biggest competitors, Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight 2 Read More...