Guest View: We need a broader view of interoperability

By Wayne Citrin

October 1, 2009 — (Page 1 of 4)
Like many in the developer community, I listened with interest to Microsoft’s JavaOne keynote, in which they presented their vision for .NET/Java interoperability. I came away disappointed, but unfortunately not surprised. Their proposed solution, as it has been ever since Microsoft and Sun started talking about interoperability, was Web services. But Web services are not interoperability. They are intercommunication.

Consider a world where Web services didn’t exist. Microsoft and Sun could have accomplished the same thing by having their .NET and Java components communicate through sockets, or through databases, or through text files in shared folders. Nobody would consider these solutions to be interoperability. These are mechanisms for sharing data or sending messages between self-contained components: intercommunication. That’s fine if all you want to do is share data or send messages. But interoperability can be so much more.

True interoperability between Java and .NET is the ability to access any Java-based entity (e.g., an object, class or method) from .NET code, or vice versa. It’s the ability to substitute something written in Java anywhere one would ordinarily use something written using .NET technology.

For example, what if you wanted to create a .NET-based component that would send and receive messages from a Java Message Service server? Or what if you wanted to use a .NET-based library in an application that was otherwise written in Java? Or what if you wanted to embed a Windows Forms control inside an SWT-based application?

Using a Web service wouldn’t be an appropriate solution for any of these problems, and it’s not possible to use Web services to intermix user interface technologies. Only a true interoperability solution can solve these kinds of problems.

There are a number of technologies that can be used to implement true interoperability between Java and .NET, but I won’t go into them here. A Web search will yield plenty of information. It’s important to point out, though, that a broader notion of interoperability can lead to many advantages over Web services:

Related Search Term(s): interoperability, Java, .NET

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JNBridge upgrade helps Java and .NET get along better
JNBridge said its 4.0 release, to be introduced this week at JavaOne 2008, makes it easier for Java developers in Eclipse to add code from the Microsoft .NET Visual Studio IDE, and vice versa, without having to leave their native development environment Read More...