Earlier this year your humble TSS.NET reporter met with Interface21’s Mark Pollack in a noisy press room just off the show floor at Microsoft TechEd 2007 in  Orlando, Fla. As a major steward of Spring.NET, Pollack is at the center of some of the more interesting interop activity these days. TheServerSide Interoperability blog now makes a discussion with Pollack available in MP3 podcast format. Read more »

Weiqi Gao provided some interesting notes on a St. Louis .NET User Group meeting where the panel topic was ‘.NET Meets Java.’  One of the expected Java voices could not make it, so the .NET side had a bit of a better chance to be heard. The sides were 2-to-1. Read more »

The OpenAjax Alliance’s activities include an Interoperability Working Group that focuses on how to combine JavaScript components from multiple Ajax toolkits within the same Web application. Microsoft’s Bertrand Le Roy describes the goal of the event as to demonstrate how different Ajax libraries can interact with each other through the OpenAjax hub, a JavaScript module that enables multiple Ajax runtimes on the same Web page. Read more »

XAML has recently come to light as a Microsoft [admittedly] version of XML used to initialize objects. There may be some early indications of an interoperability play for XAML.It is fairly robust technology – and thus not necessarily easy to develop. We are talking XML and objects here. As Ted Neward said earlier this year at The ServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas: “XAML is effectively a way to create an object model.” Read more »

Soyatec has announced the availability of eFace, a library implementing XAML in Java. This is perhaps the first endorsement of XAML outside of the Microsoft world. Read more »

By George Lawton

Samba is open-source software that allows a wide variety of computers to act as if they were a Windows file and print server. It is not exactly the center of the universe for coverage on TheServerSide.NET, but we thought it was worth a look. Samba recently made the newscasts, as its technical stewards were among key litigants involved in Microsoft’s widely heralded European Union anti-trust case.

Samba currently runs on UNIX, Linux, IBM System 390, OpenVMS, and other operating systems. It uses the TCP/IP protocol stack on the host server to provide the network connectivity with Windows clients and servers within an organization. The Samba platform provides an implementation of dozens of services and protocols including NetBIOS, SMB (Server Message Block), CIFS (Common Internet File System), DCE/RPC, a WINS server and the NT Domain Suite of protocols. The platform can be used for sharing files and printers among a number of different platforms and operating systems, including Windows. This Learning Guide introduces developers to SAMBA best practices with a variety of articles, tutorials and tips. Read more »

By Jack Vaughan

Ruby on Rails has become a popular framework for building Web apps at the same time Ruby itself has become a popular dynamic language. Ruby interest straddles both the Java and .NET worlds - but as greater numbers of Java and Ruby developers get into the Ruby development, more and more will miss familiar programming tools and methods.  How widely Ruby will expand may rest on how much Ruby program building can resemble Java or .NET program building methods – or the extent to which/how much Ruby programs, bits, and pieces can interoperate with Java and .NET programs. Read more »

We have covered Metro Web services interop technology on this site, and thought we’d let you know that the related Project Tango is now at FCS -First Customer Shipment.  Ahead of FCS, Sun has worked with key customers to produce early interop apps using Tango and Metro. Read more »

In the last year a lot of Microsoft’s attention to interop has revolved around OOXML. But the company has had other interoperability initiatives underway, and these bore fruit in recent weeks as if in sequence.

First, right after Labor Day, when hordes of journalists (and bloggers) were eager to fill their news (and blog) wells, Microsoft announced a deal with Novell to develop Silverlight for Linux. Silverlight is Microsoft’s Swiss Army Knife for futuristic interface development, poised primarily at this point as an answer to Adobe Flash.

On the heels of that news, Microsoft opened an interoperability lab together with Novell. It will eventually, the principals say,  include other vendors and technologies as it recreates a heterogeneous lab environment that reflects the IT environments of the day. Novell’s Linux position seems stronger than ever given the legal thrashing it has given to SCO, making Microsoft’s deals with Novell appear particularly prescient.

Last week, the Sun-Microsoft alliance took a step forward. Virtualization is part of the mix here as Sun and Microsoft will work together to ensure that Solaris as a guest on Microsoft virtualization technologies and that Windows Server runs as well as a guest in Sun’s virtualization technologies.

Microsoft and Sun will build an Interoperability Center on Microsoft’s Redmond campus. Included in the plans: joint Sun/Microsoft solutions in areas such as databases, e-mail and messaging, virtualization, and Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) support in Sun Ray thin clients.

Microsoft’s take on interop remains somewhat unique. And the moves of late are in what you may call ’controlled environments.’  Microsoft made big patent and suit settlement cash deals with both Novell and Sun in past years. These moves are only follow-ups on those other events, although the Silverlight port agreement did surprise a few viewers {those that don’t bated breathily follow the doings of Novell’s Miguel de Icaza, a fellow who has worked hard to bring open-source to .NET for quite a while now.  - Jack Vaughan

Microsoft this week made available the 2006 R2 version of BizTalk Server, which it is positioning as key to its delivery of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) technology. New wizards are said to ease the task of creating integration adaptors that can talk to Web service end points. Read more »