Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2006/05/18/sun_microsoft_tango_altman/
Sun and Microsoft start to dance
Instead of a slugfest, try a Tango
Posted in Software, 18th May 2006 09:26 GMT
Regardless of which camp a developer inhabits, Java or Microsoft's .NET, as applications get bigger and become composites they will increasingly need to link to applications in the other camp.
So the introduction of Tango, announced by Sun at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco, comes at a time some form of 'glue' between the two environments is required.
Tango is the project title for Sun's open source implementation of next generation Web Services Interoperability Technology (WSIT), which is designed to provide far greater levels of interoperability between applications or components assembled into composite services. The need for interoperability at some level is now the nature of most business environments.
According to Ross Altman, Sun's CTO of Business Integration and ex-top gun at Sun acquisition SeeBeyond, Tango will play an increasingly important role in the apps development world. "It is the first opportunity to bring the parallel universes of Java and .NET together," he said. "I think it is a red letter day. It is not news that Sun and Microsoft are getting along now, but this is the most tangible evidence of that rapprochement."
His says the industry is still struggling with web service standards, as standards are thoroughly mature and have stopped moving. So with web services, it is still not going to be possible to go out on to the net spontaneously and connect with run-the-business implementations.
"You can negotiate implementations that run business quality, but not on a plug and play basis. Standards have to be unambiguous and broadly adopted, of which WS-I basic profile is a good example."
In fact, the kick-off point for Tango has been Microsoft, which came out with the Windows Communications Foundation. "This was the start of it," he said, "and from Vista going forwards there will be a reference implementation of web services standards. It will be subject to Microsoft's interpretation and we have to accept that. We may not like it but that is the way it will be. As a vendor, and politically, I wish it wasn't that way, but as a practical matter it is what it is."
The sense of realism Altman shows will probably be welcomed by a good many enterprise users of Java and .NET, though it obviously lacks the humour that used to underpin the long history of sniping between the two companies.
"In a very pragmatic present day, we are working with them to make sure we have a stack of web services software available that is wholly plug and play compatible with whatever they implement in the Windows Communications Foundation (WCF), which is web services," he said. "There will be people that argue about how standards should be implemented so it's a bit of a moving target, because the WCF will evolve over time and Microsoft may only partially feel the need to closely track those movements. I'm not trying to say anything negative about Microsoft, and they can't change the WCF on a dime, and they wouldn't want to, as they will be somewhat constrained with that stack as it goes off in to hundreds of millions of applications. So it will become a de facto standard, though necessarily de jure."
The implication is that it will now be possible for developers from either camp to build applications that run across platforms that are philosophically as well as technically different. Altman noted that in the Java and .NET camps, users have a lot of options on what they do and how they do it, but across platforms they are somewhat limited. There are always some protocol conversion issues to deal with.
"The good thing about the web services stacks is that they allow us to communicate between Java and .NET at arm's length, so no one has to invest a lot of time and effort. But while that provides plug and play interoperability between the two programs, it does not provide plug and play integration. The latter would still mean that the semantics of the data would have to be clear and well understood on both sides, and that is not addressed by WS standards, but rather by content standards."
There is also the need to ensure that the sequence of messages - the choreography - is well understood, though this is different from the WS-Choreography standard. Plug and play compatibility comes with a common understanding of the data and process semantics, along with the WS-IP/WCF compatibility. In practice, there will still be a need for both parties to negotiate.
"It is a necessary first step," Altman said. "And the responsibility for the next step goes beyond Sun and Microsoft. It will be the job of user industry consortia, such as banking and manufacturing groups. Some already have addressed this, but very few of them have good end to end content standards as yet, so there will probably still be a need for some negotiation between Java and .NET applications." ®