First Tango in Redmond?

First Tango in Redmond?

Sun has given their JWSDP+WCF interop effort an official project
name - they call it Project Tango. I just saw the
official announcement of this. For a long time Microsoft has
worked with many others in the WS-* "plugfests" and there is
another one happening right now as I post this, see
here. Among people at Sun, Harold
Carr gives a nice overview of Project Tango, and Arun
Gupta is also talking about Tango.

There will probably be some cool buzz at JavaOne this year
around WCF + JWSDP interop. We recently did a survey and found
that JWSDP ranks very highly on the list of web services interop
targets, among developers using webservices worldwide. I think
Apache AXIS ranked
highest, but IBM, Oracle, and JWSDP were also top-tier. In any
case we really want to make it right with JWSDP.

For those of you not familiar with the plugfest effort - they are get-togethers of the various organizations and companies who build web services implementations. Not web services apps or tools, but the web services libraries the apps and tools rely upon. The WS-* standards are a good start to getting ubiquitous interop, but to realize the benefit of standards, you need practical interop work. That's where the plugfests fit in. Microsoft has been sponsoring these get togethers, as have other companies, for years. It is really paying off with usable interop today, and it should get even better tomorrow with simpler interop at higher levels of service, including transactions, security, reliability, and so on.

Cheers!

-Dino