Microsoft and Sun have declared some progress in their efforts to achieve interoperability citing co-operation on web services standardisation and deployment of Windows on Sun systems.

“We really are working towards a world where both Sun and Microsoft products coexist,� said Greg Papadopoulos, Sun's chief technical officer. “We’re going to ensure unique levels of interoperability.

“One thing that I have found really refreshing in this whole alliance [is] the fact that the companies actually end up being more similar than different in terms of intellectual property and how we approach R&D,� Papadopoulos said.

Hank Vigil, corporate vice-president for consumer strategy and partnerships at Microsoft, said the software giant is "quite pleased" with the progress the companies have made in the early stages of the relationship, founded in April.

There have been weekly meetings between "relationship managers" to check progress and resolve problems, they said.

There have also been 15 executive meetings, and monthly meetings between engineers.

Papadopoulos has met Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates, and Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has met Sun chairman, president, and chief executive Scott McNealy.

The two suppliers have co-authored four web services specifications in the past six months, including WS-Addressing, which was submitted to the W3C, as well as WS-Eventing, WS-MetadataExchange, and WS-Management.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is referring customers wanting Java on Windows to Sun’s JVM, since Microsoft’s JVM is not being upgraded. The companies and their partners are working to ensure Java products run well on Windows.

Sun shines on interoperability progress with Microsoft

But, try they must.
We need .NET remoting to work with J2EE session beans and vice versa - native. Seamless transactions and security will be "some" value addition.


-Abhijit

We need .NET remoting to work with J2EE session beans and vice versa - native.

Both .NET remoting and RMI have the same flaw -they are language/runtime specific. Corba support in .NET may be more possible, so you can talk CORBA to your Session bean.

More likely: better interop of SOAP stacks. Which means JAX-RPC finally acknowleges things like unsigned long and other non-Java dataypes; .NET WSE could improve in a few places too. Of course, Sun's implementation of JAX-RPC is only one of many; the IBM, BEA and Apache implementations wouldnt gain from any enhancements Sun do to their stack.

Both .NET remoting and RMI have the same flaw -they are language/runtime specific. Corba support in .NET may be more possible, so you can talk CORBA to your Session bean.

Exactly.
But if that will just work what developers and vendors will do?

More likely: better interop of SOAP stacks. Which means JAX-RPC finally acknowleges things like unsigned long and other non-Java dataypes; .NET WSE could improve in a few places too. Of course, Sun's implementation of JAX-RPC is only one of many; the IBM, BEA and Apache implementations wouldnt gain from any enhancements Sun do to their stack.

Schema includes unsigned long (https://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#built-in-derived)and if JAX-RPC did not support it that simply means it is not standard compliant.

Now Sun is selling Windows Servers.. Cool Sun needs to make a living somehow.

Now Sun is selling Windows Servers.. Cool Sun needs to make a living somehow

well Mr B.K. what r u smokin' mate ??? this thread is talking about interoperability with MS technologies and not selling Windows Server :)

well, Sun is pulling out the frog (MS) from the well who (MS) thinks that the well is the only world.

cheers mate !!!