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Today Microsoft is hosting the Learn Windows Azure broadcast event to demonstrate how easy it is for developers to get started with Windows Azure. Senior Microsoft executives like Scott Guthrie, Dave Campbell, Mark Russinovich and others will show how easy it is to build scalable cloud applications using Visual Studio. The event is be broadcasting live and will also be available on-demand.
For Java developers interested in using Windows Azure, one particularly interesting segment of the day is a new Channel 9 video with GigaSpaces. Their Cloudify offering helps Java developers easily move their applications, without any code or architecture changes, to Windows Azure.
This broadcast follows yesterday’s updates to Windows Azure around an improved developer experience, Interoperability, and scalability. A significant part of that was an update on a wide range of Open Source developments on Windows Azure, which are the latest incremental improvements that deliver on our commitment to working with developer communities so that they can build applications on Windows Azure using the languages and frameworks they already know.
We understand that developers want to use the tools that best fit their experience, skills, and application requirements, and our goal is to enable that choice. In keeping with that, we are extremely happy to be delivering new and improved experiences for popular OSS technologies such as Node.js, MongoDB, Hadoop, Solr and Memcached on Windows Azure.
You can find all the details on the full Windows Azure news here, and more information on the Open Source updates here.
Good news for all you Java developers out there: I am happy to share with you the availability of Windows Azure libraries for Java that provide Java-based access to the functionality exposed via the REST API in Windows Azure Service Bus.
You can download the Windows Azure libraries for Java from GitHub.
This is an early step as we continue to make Windows Azure a great cloud platform for many languages, including .NET and Java. If you’re using Windows Azure Service Bus from Java, please let us know your feedback on how these libraries are working for you and how we can improve them. Your feedback is very important to us!
You may refer to Windows Azure Java Developer Center for related information.
Openness and interoperability are important to Microsoft, our customers, partners, and developers and we believe these libraries will enable Java applications to more easily connect to Windows Azure, in particular the Service Bus, making it easier for applications written on any platform to interoperate with each another through Windows Azure.
Thanks,
Ram Jeyaraman
Senior Program Manager, Microsoft’s Interoperability Group
At the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco today, Sandy Gupta, the General Manager for Microsoft’s Open Solutions Group, along with Alan Clark, Director of New Initiatives and Emerging Standards for Open Source at SUSE, announced the release of a beta version of the SUSE Manager Management Pack for System Center.
In a blog post, Gupta said the announcement, which was made in collaboration with SUSE, lets this management pack connect the Linux server management capabilities provided by SUSE Manager to System Center, Microsoft’s management platform.
“As a result, customers will be able to administer both Windows and Linux environments from a single management console,” he said.
Gupta positioned the management pack as one example of the work Microsoft is doing to advance interoperability for private clouds. You can try the Linux management capabilities this management pack provides for System Center here.
“On the public cloud front, there’s extensive work going on across the company to facilitate interoperability between Microsoft and open source cloud tools and services. One of the most exciting examples of this comes from the SQL Server Team -- the Hadoop-based service for Windows Azure, for which Microsoft released a second preview last month,” he said.
This solution for managing “big data,” connecting it and turning it into business insight, is a prime example of the type of value customers want to realize as a result of leveraging open source and Microsoft software together, he noted.
You can read his full blog post here.
Today Bill Laing, Corporate VP for Server and Cloud, announced a very important set of Windows Azure updates. With these new updates, Windows Azure is more than ever an open and easy platform to build and run applications in the cloud, and the place to be for developers who want to have choice and flexibility.
I am proud to say that Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. has been working closely with the Windows Azure team and it has been a great journey together, exploring openness and taking interoperability to a new level. There is too much news in this release to cover in a single blog post, and I strongly suggest everyone attend the Meet Windows Azure event tomorrow, when Scott Guthrie and many others will provide a lot of additional information. At the same time, I would like to spend the next few paragraphs on some of the many facets of openness in Windows Azure, to further demonstrate how Windows Azure is living in interesting and exciting times.
Services and Partnerships
For one, I have to point out how all-encompassing the Windows Azure platform is becoming. We will talk in a minute about the support for IaaS, but I would like to draw your attention to how the Windows Azure platform has now announced a set of partnerships that will provide very compelling data services such as MySQL, CouchDB, and Apache Solr.
Those services can be enjoyed by PaaS and IaaS developers and come from the leading industry experts in the field: Microsoft is partnering with leading companies such as Cleardb, Cloudant and Lucid Imagination to provide true data-as-a-service and enable developers and customers to build applications at scale without the worry of provisioning and maintaining their databases. At the same time we and our partners addressed the needs of those who prefer to run software independently in their own PaaS and/or IaaS instances, providing easy installation packages of Windows Azure-optimized versions of Apache CouchDB and Apache Solr. Last but not least, we worked with 10gen to improve the installation experience of MongoDB on Windows Azure that was originally announced in December, and we are looking forward to building a great experience for Windows Azure MongoDB users.
More importantly, both Microsoft and our partners are committed to always maintain full compatibility with the underlying Open Source applications so that our customers can always rest assured their data will work everywhere. With these technologies joining the existing pool of Windows Azure SQL Database and Apache Hadoop, Windows Azure is leading by leaps and bounds when it comes to data.
OSS on Windows Azure
If Windows Azure databases are now a few clicks away, applications are far from being out in the cold. The announcement of Windows Azure Web Sites - a hosting framework for Web apps that will work across both Windows Azure and private-cloud datacenters - unveils amazing opportunities to run popular Open Source applications in Windows Azure: be it WordPress or Drupal, Joomla or Umbraco, DotNetNuke or PHPBB, or one of the many apps in the Web Sites gallery, it has never been easier to deploy applications on the Windows Azure platform. And I can’t wait for developers to try the new releases of the Windows Azure open source SDKs (now including Python in addition to .NET, Java, PHP and Node.js) as well as the integration with Git.
We are also releasing a major update to the Windows Azure Plugin for Eclipse with Java (by Microsoft Open Technologies that includes a number of user feedback-driven improvements. Among them is a significantly revamped deployment experience contributed by GigaSpaces Technologies Ltd, an established leader in helping enterprises move their Java applications to the cloud, who has recently joined in the development work behind the plugin. Their impressive “publish to cloud” wizard makes it much easier for Windows Azure developers working with Java to deploy their projects to the Windows Azure cloud directly from Eclipse. Read the more detailed blog post from Martin Sawicki that covers the Eclipse plugin in more detail.
Last but not least, you probably have noticed the upcoming support for IaaS, Virtual Machines and Linux. I believe this move demonstrates how Windows Azure is built around what customers are asking for and with the idea of being the most inclusive platform ever. Customers are demanding high degrees of flexibility and want to be able to run every possible scenario in a seamless fashion: there are very interesting examples of hybrid private/public clouds out there, not to mention a number of creative contaminations of IaaS, PaaS and data services. We are most definitely moving away from monolithic architectures – customers and developers today want and deserve flexibility.
Linux on Windows Azure
Enabling use of Linux on Windows Azure is a key piece of the puzzle, and needs to be as easy as possible. As with data services, it’s all about strong partnerships with industry leaders: this is why you are seeing Windows Azure partnering with major Linux publishers to provide an amazing experience, and I’m sure this will be a very exciting and ongoing story. On top of that I have to note how partners like BitRock are doing very interesting work to provide more choice: two initial Linux images are available for Bitnami, and we look forward to extending the catalog much further.
Allow me to make a final example of openness and talk about the Windows Azure Command Line Tools for Mac and Linux (the ones Windows Azure users will run on local machines to deploy and manage their Windows and Linux virtual machines): not only they are Open Source, but they are available right now for Mac and Linux clients. And this is just the beginning – stay tuned for more exciting news.
Openness and Interoperability
When a journey reaches an important milestone it’s good to look back and think about the road so far: in my case I went as far as two years ago, when we shared our view on Interoperability Elements of a Cloud Platform. Back then we talked to customers and developers and came out with an overview of an open and interoperable cloud, based on four distinct elements: data portability, standards, ease of migration & deployment and developer choice. We have been laser focused on the quest for an interoperable and flexible cloud platform that would enable heterogeneous workloads, and it’s really rewarding to see how today’s announcement maps nicely to the vision that we outlined back then. More precisely:
I have broken every promise I made to myself to keep this post short, yet I barely managed to scratch the surface of this announcement. I have in front of me the plan for the upcoming weeks and I know it will be busy times for this and many other blogs in Microsoft as there is so much to share. It will all start tomorrow at the Meet Windows Azure event: be there!
Here is great news for open source developers: Brian Harry announced today at the Microsoft’s ALM Summit that Git is now fully integrated into Visual Studio as well as the Team Foundation Service, Microsoft’s cloud-powered Application Lifecycle Management tool.
Here at Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., we are excited to hear such news as this offers more choice and flexibility to development teams. We happen to work on a daily basis with developers on Git in the context of projects such as Node, Dash, Redis or Solr so we totally get the goodness of this news.
The Visual Studio Tools for Git work great against Git repositories locally, in Team Foundation Service, on GitHub, CodePlex, BitBucket etc. That’s all because they are using Git as the distributed source control solution and they talk to Git repositories via the open source library LibGit2. LibGit2 is a portable C library that runs on many different platforms including Linux and Mac.
Microsoft engineers in Brian’s team have been contributing to LibGit2 for a number of months now as they worked with the community to add Git support in Visual Studio – some of them earning committer rights on this popular and very active open source project. Even better as the team started testing the integration, all the bug fixes and security fixes that they found also have been contributed back to the project.
Therefore not only is Brian’s announcement good news for developers in Visual Studio wanting to use Git to contribute to open source projects, it’s also great news for others building on top of the LibGit2 library on any platform.
The Visual Studio Tools for Git are provided as an extension for Visual Studio 2012 but Brian also says that they should be included in the box with all editions of Visual Studio in a future release – including the Express editions.
I can tell you MS Open Tech engineers can’t wait to take full advantage of the Visual Studio Tools for Git in their daily interaction and collaboration with the open source developers’ community.
It's been just one month since Microsoft Open Technologies announced the early preview of VM Depot, a community-driven catalog of open source virtual machine images. Today we are proud to announce that the community has rallied to our call and already produced over 100 images. We are thrilled at the reception this preview has received and there are more images appearing every day. VM Depot, even in preview, is already a valuable resource for open source projects and their communities. On VM Depot the community can build, deploy and share their favorite Linux configuration, create custom open source stacks, work with others and build new architectures for the cloud that leverage the openness and flexibility of the Windows Azure platform.
We already have a range of base Linux distributions upon which you can build new images. These include, but are not limited to, Debian, Centos, Ubuntu and Mageia. There are images that include “big brand” open source projects such as WordPress, Drupal as well as developer stacks such as the LAMP, Ruby Stack and Apache Tomcat. All these are complemented nicely by more niche projects such as the Moodle course management system and PhPCompta, an accounting application adapted to Belgian legislation. Each day we are seeing more and more open source software published on VM Depot for deployment to Windows Azure. I can only thank the growing community for so fully embracing the VM Depot preview. It's great to arrive here at Microsoft just as this is taking off, I look forward to working with you as we go from strength to strength.
If you haven't already done so, now is a really good time to take a look at the ever growing range of images available. If you have an Azure subscription, you're ready to try it out, if not you can quickly sign up for a free 90-day trial subscription. In addition to being able to deploy from your Azure portal we have provided cross-platform command line tools that give you all the control you need. All we ask is that you remember this is a community effort so please rate and comment on any images you try out. This will help users find the best images and help maintainers ensure they are meeting user's needs.
Should the image you are looking for not be available yet you can let the community know via the VM Depot forums, with luck someone else will have the same need and publish their image for you. Alternatively, you can build and publish an image yourself. Instructions for publishing and managing images are available on the VM Depot website. If you need any assistance please post to the forums where I or another community member will be pleased to help you.
It is clear from the communities uptake of VM Depot that open source is front and center on Windows Azure, with your help we look forward to building on the early momentum this preview release has generated.
Today Scott Guthrie blogged about new releases of Microsoft’s Web developer tools that reflect a snapshot of improvements and contributions from the open source community and Microsoft Open Technologies Hub (The Hub). The latest updates from ASP.NET SignalR and Web API are good to go thanks to our cool collaboration.
All code submissions met a high bar before being merged into the source. These submissions were reviewed and tested by The Hub development team to ensure the project maintains the high quality and reliability that all of our customers demand.
Once shipped, these products are now officially fully supported by Microsoft Corp. and backed by its lifecycle. This approach is unique - allowing rapid open source innovation, while also providing continuity for Microsoft’s business customers.
Here’s a quick overview of the latest products and features, along with links to their open source repository homes. Please keep the feedback coming so we can continue to make these tools better together.
ASP.NET SignalR
ASP.NET SignalR provides real-time web functionality to applications, and may best be expressed by the description on the ASP.NET SignalR website:
“ASP.NET SignalR is a new library for ASP.NET developers that makes it incredibly simple to add real-time web functionality to your applications. What is "real-time web" functionality? It's the ability to have your server-side code push content to the connected clients as it happens, in real-time.”
The Hub support for ASP.NET SignalR comes with a long-term roadmap. As with the other open source projects in our portfolio, The Hub is dedicated to maintaining a high level of development resources for ASP.NET SignalR, as well as making the customer feedback loop better to allow growth of customer usage.
ASP.NET SignalR has an active community. Community contributions can be submitted to the ASP.NET SignalR GitHub repository. All code submissions will be reviewed and tested by The Hub to ensure the project remains high quality and reliable. Before accepting contributions a contributor must sign a contribution agreement. A contributor then submits their patch, which, if accepted, will be merge into the source.
ASP.NET Web API
The ASP.NET Web API now includes support for OData endpoints, with support for JSON.Light and custom conventions. Automated help page generation allows developers to quickly and easily create documentation for web APIs.
Get started with OData at http://www.asp.net/web-api/overview/odata-support-in-aspnet-web-api.
More details on automated help page generation can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/yaohuang1/archive/2012/08/15/introducing-the-asp-net-web-api-help-page-preview.aspx.
Here at The Hub we are very excited to see new projects and updates continue to roll out with the help of the open source community. With your participation, we’re continuing to build open source engineering best practices. As we go ahead, we are looking forward to working even closer with open source projects and communities.
Any time you can open up a platform to more options for interoperability, it’s a great thing. It’s even better if the platform is as popular as Apache Hadoop and the new option is one that has been accepted as a popular choice. And earlier today, HortonWorks announced another interoperability achievement for the Apache Hadoop project on their blog by highlighting how Hadoop now runs natively on Microsoft Windows platforms:
“One of the things we believe strongly in here at Hortonworks is community driven open source and, obviously, the bigger the community, the better. The community opens itself up to new members by the developmental choices it makes and last week the Apache Hadoop community voted to significantly expand itself by agreeing to accept enhancements into the core trunk that make Apache Hadoop run natively on the Microsoft Windows platforms including Windows Server and Windows Azure. These enhancements were the result of many, many months of joint engineering work from Microsoft and Hortonworks and we are glad to see the community accept and embrace them. So far, as is common in the Apache Hadoop project, we developed these in a development branch for over a year and once this work was complete, the community voted to incorporate these changes into the mainline trunk.”
We at Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., want to congratulate the teams at the Apache Software Foundation, HortonWorks and Microsoft Corporation that made this happen! We’re excited to see where native support for Apache Hadoop on Windows Server and Windows Azure will take the community.
We are just days away from reaching a significant milestone for our team and the open source and open standards communities: the first anniversary of Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. (MS Open Tech) -- a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft.
We can’t think of anyone better to celebrate with than YOU, the members of the open source and open standards community and technology industry who have helped us along on our adventure over the past year.
We’d like to extend an open (pun intended!) invitation to celebrate with us on April 25, and share your burning questions on the future of the subsidiary, open source at-large and how MS Open Tech can better connect with the developer community to present even more choice and freedom.
I’ll be proud to share the stage with our amazing MS Open Tech leadership team: Jean Paoli, President; Kamaljit Bath, Engineering team leader; and Paul Cotton, Standards team leader and Co-Chair of the W3C HTML Working Group.
We will share personal anecdotes about how an unlikely pairing -- Microsoft and open source / open standards – may go down in history as successful as Chocolate & Peanut Butter, Cats & the Internet, and Pirates & Ninjas.
Come raise a toast to how far we have come as a community, and to the exciting places we’ll be headed in the next 12 months.
Find your ticket below, and register here http://congratsmsopentech.eventbrite.com.
Cheers,
Gianugo Rabellino Senior Director, Open Source Communities Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.
As Microsoft continues to deliver on its commitment to Interoperability, I have good news on the Open Source Software front: today, the OData Library for Objective-C project was submitted to the Outercurve Foundation’s Data, Languages, and Systems Interoperability gallery.
This means that OData4ObjC, the OData client for iOS, is now a full, community-supported Open Source project.
The Open Data Protocol (OData) is a web protocol for communications between client devices and RESTful web services, simplifying the building of queries and interpreting the responses from the server. It specifies how a web service can state its semantics such that a generic library can express those semantics to an application, meaning that applications do not need to be custom-written for a single source.
The Outercurve Foundation already hosts 19 OSS projects and, as Gallery Manager Spyros Sakellariadis notes in his blog post, this is the gallery’s second OData project, the first being the OData Validation project contributed last August.
“With this new assignment, we expect to involve open source community developers even more in the enhancement of seminal OData libraries,” he said.
Microsoft Senior Program Manager for OData Arlo Belshee notes in his blog post that the Open Sourcing of the OData client library for Objective C will enable first-class support of this important platform. “Combined with exiting support for Android (Odata4j, OSS and Windows Phone (in the odata-sdk by Microsoft), this release provides strong, uniform support for all major phones,” he said.
In assigning ownership of the code to the Outercurve Foundation, the project leads are opening it up for community contributions and support. “They firmly believe that the direction and quality of the project are best managed by users in the community, and are eager to develop a broad base of contributors and followers,” Belshee said.
As Microsoft continues to build and provide Interoperability solutions, Sakellariadis thanked the Open Source communities for their continued support, noting that together “we can all contribute to achieving a goal of device and cloud interoperability, of true openness.”
I am thrilled to announce the availability of a new specification called SQL Database Federations, which describes additional SQL capabilities that enable data sharding (horizontal partitioning of data) for scalability in the cloud.
The specification has been released under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise. With these additional SQL capabilities, the database tier can provide built-in support for data sharding to elastically scale-out the data. This is yet another milestone in our Openness and Interoperability journey.
As you may know, multi-tier applications scale-out their front and middle tiers for elastic scale-out. With this model, as the demand on the application varies, administrators add and remove new instances of the front end and middle tier nodes to handle the workload.
However, the database tier in general does not yet provide built-in support for such an elastic scale-out model and, as a result, applications had to custom build their own data-tier scale-out solution. Using the additional SQL capabilities for data sharding described in the SQL Database Federations specification the database tier can now provide built-in support to elastically scale-out the data-tier much like the middle and front tiers of applications. Applications and middle-tier frameworks can also more easily use data sharding and delegate data tier scale-out to database platforms.
Openness and interoperability are important to Microsoft, our customers, partners, and developers, and so the publication of SQL Database Federations specification under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise will enable applications and middle-tier frameworks to more easily use data sharding, and also enable database platforms to provide built-in support for data sharding in order to elastically scale-out the data.
Also of note: The additional SQL capabilities for data sharding described in the SQL Database Federations specification are now supported in Microsoft SQL Azure via the SQL Azure Federation feature.
Here is an example that uses Microsoft SQL Azure to illustrate the use of the additional SQL capabilities for data sharding described in the SQL Database Federations specification.
-- Assume the existence of a user database called sales_db. Connect to sales_db and create a federation called orders_federation to scale out the tables: customers and orders. This creates the federation represented as an object in the sales_db database (root database for this federation) and also creates the first federation member of the federation.
CREATE FEDERATION orders_federation(c_id BIGINT RANGE) GO
-- Deploy schema to root, create tables in the root database (sales_db)
CREATE TABLE application_configuration(…) GO
…
-- Connect to the federation member and deploy schema to the federation member
USE FEDERATION orders_federation(c_id=0) … GO
-- Create federated tables: customers and orders
CREATE TABLE customers (customer_id BIGINT PRIMARY KEY, …) FEDERATED ON (c_id = customer_id) GO
CREATE TABLE orders (…, customer_id BIGINT NOT NULL) FEDERATED ON (c_id = customer_id) GO
-- To scale out customer’s orders, SPLIT the federation data into two federation members
USE FEDERATION ROOT … GO
ALTER FEDERATION orders_federation SPLIT AT(c_id=100) GO
-- Connect to the federation member that contains the value ‘55’
USE FEDERATION orders_federation(c_id=55) … GO
-- Query the federation member that contains the value ‘55’
UPDATE orders SET last_order_date=getutcdate()… GO
I am confident that you will find the additional SQL capabilities for data sharding described in the SQL Database Federations specification very useful as you consider scaling-out the data-tier of your applications. We welcome your feedback on the SQL Database Federations specification.
The past few weeks have been very busy in our offices as we announced the creation of Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. Now that the dust has settled it’s time for us to resume our regular cadence in releasing code, and we are happy to share with you the very first deliverable from our new company: a new and significant iteration of our work on Redis on Windows, the open-source, networked, in-memory, key-value data store.
The major improvements in this latest version involve the process of saving data on disk. Redis on Linux uses an OS feature called Fork/Copy On Write. This feature is not available on Windows, so we had to find a way to be able to mimic the same behavior without changing completely the save on disk process so as to avoid any future integration issues with the Redis code.
The version we released today implements the Copy On Write process at the application level: instead of relying on the OS we added code to Redis so that some data structures are duplicated in such a way that Redis can still serve requests from clients while saving data on disk (thus achieving the same effect of Fork/Copy On Write does automatically on Linux).
You can find the code for this new version on the new MS Open Tech repository in GitHub, which is currently the place to work on the Windows version of Redis as per guidance from Salvatore Sanfilippo, the original author of the project. We will also continue working with the community to create a solid Windows port.
We consider this not to be production ready code, but a solid code base to be shared with the community to solicit feedback: as such, while we pursue stabilization, we are keeping the older version as default/stable on the GitHub repository. To try out the new code, please go to the bksavecow branch.
In the next few weeks we plan to extensively test the code so that developers can use it for more serious testing. In the meantime, we will keep looking at the ‘save on disk’ process to find out if there are other opportunities to make the code perform even better. We will promote the bksavecow branch to master as soon as we (and you!) are confident the code is stable.
Please send your feedback, file suggestions and issues to our GitHub repository. We look forward to further iterations and to working with the Redis community at large to make the Windows experience even better.
Claudio Caldato
Principal Program Manager
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.
A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation.
Today, at BSDCan 2012, Microsoft and partners NetApp and Citrix announced upcoming native support for FreeBSD support on Windows Server Hyper-V.
This move continues our commitment to extend support across platforms to the Windows Server Hyper-V solution, making it easier for more customers to realize the benefits of server virtualization and more easily adopt cloud computing.
This will allow FreeBSD to run as a first-class guest on Windows Server Hyper-V. The drivers and associated source code will be released early this summer under the BSD license, and will initially work with FreeBSD 8.2 and 8.3 on Windows Server 2008 R2.
You can read more about this on the Openness blog.
Joe CaraDonna, the Technical Director of Core Operating Systems at NetApp, says in an interview that he was thrilled to have had the opportunity to work with Microsoft and Citrix to deliver Windows Server Hyper-V support to FreeBSD.
“I think the combination of these virtualization technologies helps round-out the FreeBSD virtualization story, and makes the FreeBSD operating system a more compelling offering.”
He also notes how committed Microsoft is to open source initiatives: “we decided from the very beginning that we were going to open source the code under the BSD license. No strings attached. They were as eager as us to support the project, and then give the code away. How cool is that?”
You can read the full interview here.
by admin on April 18, 2006 05:03pm
I got the chance to spend an hour this week with Dr. Wayne Citrin, CTO of JNBridge. He’s been refining a Java/.NET interoperability product for the last five years – starting out with a risky bet on .NET when it was only in Beta. Back then I was at BEA Systems, we tried to use jCOM as a bridge to Microsoft applications that customers needed to integrate with J2EE systems. There were reliability and configuration challenges with this approach, and we found that as .NET grew in our customer base, we could only advise them to use Web Services for interoperability.
WS for interoperability is a good choice when you can build well-defined contracts between systems and coarse-grained, loosely coupled integration is acceptable (despite the performance and reliability impacts). There are situations where tightly-coupled integration is necessary (specific security requirements; chatty communications), which is where I’d apply a product like JNBridge.
JNBridge handles the conversion of Java objects into .NET objects and vice versa – including management of references on both sides to ensure that object extent is handled correctly, and converting “by reference” and “by value” situations to their correct native implementation. I’m simplifying for brevity, but for more detail you can take a look here.
They have 3 modes of operation – XML/HTTP, Binary/TCP, and Shared Memory (for running on the same server). As we proceeded through the discussion, I was interested in how they dealt with the “complex object” issue, where a Java object contains other objects by reference.
When converting complex objects to Web Services, the antipattern is to marshal the entire object graph into a SOAP message, add getters and setters to the remote proxy that handle write-backs. This causes problems both in communication overhead and performance (that’s a lot of data to marshal to XML; plus this marshalling will happen every time the remote client needs to update a field in the complex object). There are other problems that I won’t get into here.
For these situations, it can work better to have a tightly-coupled integration layer – with JNBridge, you could use their Binary/TCP mode to have a conversion from Java to .NET objects happening on the J2EE server, and communicating with the .NET tier through native .NET remoting.
Another common interop request I hear from software architects is to have BizTalk or .NET interop with JMS (Java Message Service). This is an area that I haven’t seen great solutions to in the past. The best approach from performance and reliability standpoint should result from a tightly-coupled integration at the JMS Client layer; here I would consider deploying JNBridge in Shared Memory mode, with .NET application logic on the same machine as JNBridge and a JMS Client, which would remotely access a JMS Cluster via RMI or your Java protocol of choice.
Now if only Java were associated with Guinness we could call this approach a “Black-and-Tan”… as it is I’ll have to leave it “Half-and-half”.
by Peter Galli on July 22, 2010 10:01am
Jean Paoli, the General Manager for Interoperability Strategy at Microsoft, delivered a keynote address at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, OR, this morning titled "Open Cloud, Open Data."
During his keynote, Paoli addressed four foundational elements that comprise an open cloud platform: Data Portability, Standards, Ease of Migration and Deployment, and Developer Choice.
Paoli also talked about why Microsoft views these elements as a catalyst for the industry conversations about interoperability in the cloud, including how Data Portability allows customers to own their own data, whether stored on-premises or in the cloud, necessitating cloud platforms to facilitate the movement of customer data in and out of the cloud.
Jean Paoli
Cloud platforms should also support commonly used industry standards so as to facilitate interoperability with other software and services that support the same standards, while also providing a secure migration path that preserves existing investments and should enable the co-existence between on-premise software and cloud services, Paoli said.
This will enable customers to run "customer clouds" and partners, including hosters, to run "partner clouds" as well as take advantage of public cloud platform services. Cloud platforms should also offer developers choice in software development tools, languages and runtimes, he told attendees.
Microsoft also launched a new website today, designed to show these elements through supporting technical examples.
In addition, several Microsoft senior architects will use their technical sessions at OSCON to provide in-depth software engineering sessions on the technical underpinnings of the four elements for open source developers.
"We are introducing the interoperability elements of a cloud platform with a set of supporting technical examples to help frame and organize further discussions within existing industry organizations and with our customers, partners and other IT companies, including competitors," Paoli said.
Over the past two years, Microsoft has increased its open source community project work to support cloud platform interoperability, and will use OSCON to present some of the new and existing developments currently in progress that support open source developers working in mixed IT environments.
The release of Windows Azure Software Development Kits (SDK) for a number of languages including Java and PHP is one example of the work the company is doing to help developers. Microsoft also recently sponsored Java and PHP SDKs to support the Open Data Protocol (OData), a REST-based Web protocol for manipulating data across platforms ranging from mobile to server to cloud.
"Today, we're also releasing the OData Client for Objective-C (for iPhone & Mac), a new version for iPhone and Mac, with the source code posted on CodePlex, our open source code repository," Paoli said.
Also available today is the latest version of Windows Azure Command Line Tools for PHP to the Microsoft Web Platform Installer, which let developers use a simple command-line tool without an Integrated Development Environment to easily package and deploy new or existing PHP applications to Windows Azure.
CoApp, a CodePlex Foundation project, aims to create a vibrant Open Source ecosystem on Windows by providing the technologies needed to build a complete community-driven Package Management System, along with tools to make it easier for open source developers to build applications targeting the Windows platform.
There are currently 12 committers to the project and those interested in joining can get more information here.
All of this underscores Microsoft's ongoing commitment to openness, from the way it build products, collaborates with customers, and works with others in the industry, while Geeknet, Inc. recently reported that there are some 350,000 Open Source projects now compatible with Windows.
You can find an overview of Microsoft's OSCON presentations here, while more information about open source updates and technical bridges is available here.