I just finished listening to an episode of the Connected Show podcast. Most of the episode is an interview with Ted Neward about the Apache Stonehenge project. Ted brings up some really good points about the project.

1. Everything is in the open on the mailing list. Right now we are trying to decide what all will end up in our 2nd milestone release. If you want to have a say please jump in and give your opinions.

2. The projects is completely open source so you can see what others are doing and decide for yourself if the code follows “best practices” or if you have a better way. I have to admit that personally I sometimes find the idea of having thousands of people (I wish it were that many but some day it may grow to that) doing a code review on my code a little intimidating.

3. Microsoft is committed to interoperability. This is just one of several interoperability projects that I am aware of. While Microsoft is still competing and trying to make better products so we will all buy them they also have gotten the message that they have to play nice and are working hard to make sure that they do.

I really had to laugh when Ted explained that we aren’t espousing “best practices” because historically what is considered best practice when a technology is new is rarely what is best practice many years later. I have talked with some of the others on the project at different meetings we are attending. We are trying to get interoperability first and foremost with thought being put into how to make it easier to test the interoperability and also if we can provide test harnesses to make it easier to test the growing matrix of configuration and interoperability options.

If you want to see how web service implementations from various vendors can all work together check out the project at http://incubator.apache.org/stonehenge/