Microsoft donates code to Apache Stonehenge project

By David Worthington

January 20, 2009 — Several months after joining the Apache Foundation, Microsoft has made a code contribution to an Apache project. The project, known as Stonehenge, is made up of companies and developers seeking to test the interoperability of Web standards implementations.

Stonehenge contributors are expected to provide sample code for applications that work across platforms, and to work around differences in their respective standards implementations.

The Stonehenge incubation project was announced in November 2008 at ApacheCon. Apache, Microsoft, Red Hat and WSO2 are listed as contributors.

Microsoft announced its contribution to Stonehenge today: a sample application called StockTrader 2.0. StockTrader implements WS-* standards and was designed to demonstrate service-oriented architecture design principles.

"In general, this is a big issue. The whole point of standards is to provide for interoperability, but so many are implemented in slightly different ways that the desired interoperability is not achieved," said ZapThink managing partner Jason Bloomberg.

In many ways, that lack of standards interoperability is slowing down Web services efforts, and SOA has now outpaced Web services due to the standards challenge being faced, he added.

Standards interoperability is what allows mobile phones to work anywhere in the world, Bloomberg noted. "Imagine what has to happen to make that work. Handsets are working with local providers across infrastructures. In IT, there is nothing like that. It is still using stone knives and bearskins compared to the telecommunications world's leverage of standards."

The Apache Foundation is not the only group working toward standards interoperability. In December, the Web Services Test Forum, an industry group that tests standards-based integrations, went public with its work. Its members include Cisco, IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, Software AG and TIBCO.

“Stonehenge and WSTF were conceived independently, and there may be some overlap," said Kamajit Bath, principal program manager of the Microsoft interoperability technical strategy team. "Microsoft sees them as potentially complementary, with Stonehenge focused on developing application code to illustrate how to use the Web services infrastructure to build interoperable services that address real world scenarios.”

Related Search Term(s): SOA, testing, Apache, Microsoft

Share this link: http://sdt.bz/33204

Technorati

Digg

Slashdot

Facebook

Friendfeed

Twitter

del.icio.us

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache ACE as a Top-Level Project Open Source OSGi software distribution framework especially suited for the Cloud and embedded computing markets.

Microsoft combines SOA and storage business units Connected Systems Division and Data and Storage Platforms Division are combining into a new group called the Business Platform Division. An analyst says that the company may be assigning a lower value to its services-oriented architecture strategy due to the general economic downturn.

Microsoft licenses Web Sandbox under Apache 2.0 Microsoft's Live Labs has released its Web Sandbox runtime under the Apache 2.0 open-source license. The company hopes to draw increased interest from outside sources and to use those sources to improve the quality of the runtime.

Comments

01/24/2009 11:08:39 PM EST

In other news, Secunia issued virus attack warnings for all Apache servers after multiple trojans infected all updated versions. Thousands came crashing down after some newly submitted code was updated.

United StatesRob

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache ACE as a Top-Level Project
Open Source OSGi software distribution framework especially suited for the Cloud and embedded computing markets Read More...