Microsoft pledges interoperability as its watchword

Microsoft is touting its interoperability initiatives

Microsoft has used its first ever keynote at the JavaOne conference to stress its commitment to interoperability with Java.

The company reiterated its support for building interoperability between .Net and Java, and gave details of a stock trading application it has been working on with Sun Microsystems as a demonstration of how the two coding environments can be used together.

"The Microsoft commitment is there to drive interoperability because it's good for business and good for our customers," said Daniel Lewin, Microsoft corporate vice president for strategic and emerging business development.

"We're working really hard on Windows on Sun and Java on Windows. We've developed a really good market when we go with Windows on Sun, and similarly Java on Windows."

Microsoft commissions a blind poll of developers every year, said Steve Martin, senior director of development platform products for Microsoft. The results have shown that 73 per cent of developers use .Net or Java, or both, on a daily basis.

As such it was key that the two platforms worked together as seamlessly as possible. "We come in peace and want to talk about interoperability," he said. "We've gone from a world where interoperability is nice to have, to it being a must have."

Martin showed off the fruits of a collaboration between Sun and Microsoft with a stock trading application that was part of the Apache Software Foundation's Stonehenge project, which seeks to promote interactivity via web standards.

Sun and Microsoft had been working together for five years on improving interoperability, he said, and would continue to do so in the foreseeable future.