We had some fun on this blog a little while ago when Huw Collingbourne ably essayed on Ruby, its place in the development world, and its possible resemblance to the original Visual Basic, as a quick, productive route to application building. See Is Ruby the New VB?  .  That post elicited worthwhile comments on TheServerSide Interoperability Blog, as well as some threads on our Mother Ship, TheServerSide.com. George Lawton recently plowed through those threads, digested them, and he now offers some views thereof in the following post.  - J.V. Read more »

In a Guest Blog entry, SapphireSteel Software’s Huw Collingbourne writes about Ruby for TheServerSide Interoperability blog.  The Ruby programming bandwagon is picking up speed and both Sun and Microsoft have jumped onboard, he says. In a way, Ruby embodies many of the features that made Visual Basic so successful. It is not so much what Ruby does today that is causing all the excitement - but, rather, what it might do some time soon. Read more »

Richard Pawson writes that most of the interoperability discussion seems concerned with how to get software implemented on the Java platform to connect with software implemented on .NET, or vice versa.  But there is another potentially relevant discussion: how to write software that will run, without modification, on either platform. Read more »

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 »

REST meets SOA as Rich Seeley talks with XFire creator and new MuleSource hand Dan Diephouse. He rejects the criticism that REST may have trouble scaling in enterprise applications, but he argues that tools are needed to make it easier for developers to create RESTful Web services. Read more »

Adobe ColdFusion 8 brings built-in .NET integration tools to developers working with the widely used server. Clearly, this is an example of how ISVs can drive forward the cause of platform interoperability. Adobe used JNBridge tools. Read more »

Headius blogger Charles Nutter has issued a call to any and all interested in running non-Java languages on the Java Virtual Machine. He opines that diversity is needed in the JVM Languages group. Read more »

TheServerSide Interop Blog has covered Web services extensively. But not to the inclusion of other methods of achieving interoperability. One premise we have pursued – one that is not a natural fit with the Silver Bullet mentality of most software marketing, is that Web services is not the be-all and end-all – not the answer to every question. Okay, so that’s out of the way.  The matter came up as part of our recent discussion with Alex Krapf of Codemesh, maker of Juggernaut.

We asked Alex about Web services. He said: “I think of Web services as the CORBA of our day.” We asked why he said that. Read more »

Alexander Krapf is president and co-founder of Codemesh. We were glad recently to sit down with Alex and discuss some of the ins and outs of modern interoperability. We present these in parts, following our initial  discussion of early milestones in .NET-Java, with a look at code generators with ‘knowledge’ about Java and .NET, and a run-time library that can deal with the delicate aspects of interacting in the ‘no-man’s land’ between the major languages. Read more »

Alexander Krapf is president and co-founder of Codemesh. He worked with Hitachi back in the early CORBA days, and since then he has been involved equally in .NET,  C++, and Java. We were glad recently to sit down with Alex and discuss some of the ins and outs of interoperability today. We present these in parts, starting with a discussion of early milestones in .NET-Java. That means a look at early JNI.

At the turn of the century, a healthy number of C++ shops were adding servers built in Java. The question often, said Krapf, was how one could leverage established utilities. There were DLLs that were responsible for logging data access – basically a whole slew of things that one could not leverage from the Java side. Krapf saw benefits on use of CORBA in some instances … Read more »