Usually when we talk about Java / .NET interop, we’re talking about services, messages, SOAP, web services, etc. But here’s a cool article by Simon on interoping Java SWING with Windows Forms. Not particulatrly tight interop in this case (it looks like the two forms are in seperate processes), but it gets the job done.

I haven’t had time to blog last weeks blogger dinner in Seattle. I had a great time. Scoble and I drove over with Deepak from the MSN TV group. I spent quite a while talking to Steve about syndicating reference data, which builds on his recent SOA posts (more on that later). The coolest new thing this time was meeting Eric Promislow, a senior developer with ActiveState. Eric is responsible for Visual Perl, Visual Python and Visual XSLT (and apparently the Baconizer). One of the Visual XSLT developers was also there, but I missed his name (sorry). The three of us had a very interesting discussion on dynamic languages (something I know little about) and language design (something I know a moderate amount about). I know Ward is a perl guy, so maybe I should give Visual Perl a whirl.

I also got to rant about explain my view of SOA to Scoble on the way home. Lucky him.

I got a couple of emails yesterday at my work address that my blog was down. Turns out there’s this big winter storm battering the east coast. My blog is hosted on the east coast and they lost power for a while. No power == no blog. But if you’re reading this, you’ve probably already figured out that the power is back on and my blog is back up.

I found this interview with the BEA deputy CTO Benjamin Renaud via a news post on TSS.NET. BEA’s position is summed up in the following quote:

“Microsoft will standardise at the protocol level, but they won’t standardise at the API level,” he said. “Customers are not that gullible. The real level where integration happens is at the programming level.”

I like Ted’s response to this:

We’re sorry, Mr. Renaud, but integration isn’t necessarily what web services are after–interoperability, in the form of loosely coupled components that know how to exchange messages of data, are the key to truly powerful web services. If you want programmatic integration, you have to standabrdize on programming platform and language, and that’s not what web services were supposed to be for.

As to his complaint that Microsoft is engaged in a huge bait-and-switch, we believe he’s either not putting enough faith in the development community to see this conspiracy, or else he’s trying to cry foul over the fact that BEA has to compete with others in the Java space for the web services dollar, where Microsoft stands relatively alone.

However, I’m not sure what Ted’s driving at with his interop vs. integration argument. To me, they seem to go hand in hand – two great tastes that taste great together. Web services are important for both. If I’m not integrating disparate systems, I probably don’t care about interop that much.

Personally, I care much more about integration than interop. Even if I was going to build a system-of-systems all using only .NET technology, I would still use a service-oriented approach and implement those services using web service technology. The service-oriented approach allows me to be more flexible in the way I stitch my services together. Using web service technology allows me to leverage platform technology (ASMX, WSE, Indigo, etc) so I don’t have to roll the whole stack myself. The fact that I get interop “for free” by using this approach is an extra bonus that I don’t really care much about – at first. That built-in interop, even in this single-platform-which-never-happens-in-the-real-world scenario, helps make my systems future-resistant (nothing is future-proof). New customers, new partners, mergers – come what may, I have a better-than-average chance of being able to integrate it into my system. That gives me an real advantage ($$$) in the marketplace.

Of course, back in the real-world where you’re creating a system-of-systems from a series of stand-alone systems that are all built with different platforms, interop is much more important. But that doesn’t mean integration is any less important.

Traditionally, our team has divided architects into three categories: Strategic, Application and Infrastructure. Gurpreet Pall, of MSA Enterprise Data Center fame and the new head of our Architecture Strategy team, suggested a different categorization scheme: Component, System and System-of-Systems. I like this scheme because it is more hierarchical where the scopes of strategic, application and infrastructure architects have small intersections.

Gurpeet’s scheme is also interesting in that component architects of system-of-systems architects don’t typically have much to talk about. Component architecture is below the abstraction layer for system-of-systems architects.

I’m not suggesting one view is better than the other, they are both interesting views into the same space. However, I’d like a better term than “system-of-systems architect”.