Microsoft and Sun recently announced their Open Source Project Stonehenge at the JavaOne conference. Stonehenge is a reference implementation that shows how to bridge the two major development platforms Java and .NET using Web Services. This initiative definitely puts the spotlight on heterogeneity and the challenges that come with it Read more on http://blog.dynatrace.com

Microsoft and Sun recently announced their Open Source Project Stonehenge at the JavaOne conference. Stonehenge is a reference implementation that shows how to bridge the two major development platforms Java and .NET using Web Services. This initiative definitely puts the spotlight on heterogeneity and the challenges that come with it

Read more on http://blog.dynatrace.com

Andreas - cetrainly good point however i'd like to point that interoperability via webservices puts a strong limit as to the level of interoperability that you could achieve between the two environments. The performance overhead associated with web services is simply too high for many of the applications. Ideally it would be best if there would be VM level interoperability that will ensure that byte code representation of data object would be portable between the two domains. Something similar to iKVM Because of that limitation we found ourselves implementing our own portable binary serialization format (PBS) that was designed to enable much more efficient interoperability between Java and .Net. In this way you can write a Java object and pass it to a .Net application and visa versa - see full details here. Interestingly we found that our PBS provided 30% faster serialization performance then native .Net serialization. Nati S. GigaSpaces

Hi Nati I totally agree with you. Web Services (SOAP via HTTP) was the protocol of choice for Microsoft and Sun to integrate their two platforms. I also think that the overhead that is involved with SOAP is far too high when used in a scenario where individual components hosted in a single environment have to communicate with each other. There are "slimmer" protocols out there. I talked with Microsoft at JavaOne and they told me that they are going to work on other protocols in the future. Thanks for the link to your implementation - 30% performance improvement for serialization sounds very promising. Andi