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/

Today there were many pieces of good news for the Apache Stonehenge project. I have been working on the project for the last few months. There has been a lot of work (mostly by others) to make sure that we have a good quality release. The first is that we have released the M1 milestone that shows interoperability between PHP, Java, and .NET implementations of the application. You can mix and match the different front ends, business processing services, and order processing services as you want. I will paste the announcement below for those who are interested.

The second piece of good news was that the Stonehenge project was a large part of the demo given during the keynote at the Java One conference today. Greg Leake from Microsoft and Harold Carr from Sun demonstrated Stonehenge working with a Java implementation created by Sun.

The third piece of good news was that Sun donated their implementation of the Stocktrader application to the Apache Stonehenge project. Now there are multiple Java implementations.

Since the whole purpose of the Stonehenge project is to show interoperability between different web service stacks I would love to see other vendors such as BEA (Oracle) and IBM also contribute solutions. For many years we have been talking about how standards will help the industry with interoperability. The Apache Stonehenge project is showing concrete proof of how that works and better yet with the code and configuration files available anyone can examine how it was done and duplicate it in their mixed environment.

As promised earlier here is the text from the announcement of the Stonehenge M1 milestone.

We are pleased to announce the release of Apache Stonehenge
(incubator) version M1.
You can download this release from
http://incubator.apache.org/stonehenge/download.html
http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/incubator/stonehenge
 
Apache Stonehenge is a set of example applications for Service
Oriented Architecture
that spans languages and platforms and demonstrates best practise and
interoperability.
The aim of the Stonehenge project is to develop a set of sample applications to
demonstrate seamless interoperability across multiple underlying
platform technologies
by using currently defined W3C and OASIS standard protocols. By having
a set of sample
applications, with multiple language and framework implementations
will become a useful
and important part of the SOA landscape. It will:
 
* illustrate and develop best practice for interoperable
applications that communicate
via distributed protocols,
* demonstrate interoperability between platforms,
* provide sample code upon which SOA developers can build,
* help identify interoperability issues and their solutions, and
* build confidence in cross-platform deployment of SOA technologies.
 
Disclaimer: Apache Stonehenge is an effort undergoing incubation at
the Apache Software
Foundation (ASF), sponsored by the Apache Incubator PMC. Incubation is
required of all newly accepted projects until a further review
indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making
process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful
ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection
of the completeness
or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to
be fully endorsed by the ASF.
 
Apache Stonehenge web site is at
http://incubator.apache.org/stonehenge/
 
Issues can be reported here.
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/STONEHENGE
 
We welcome your early feedback.
Thank you for your interest in Apache Stonehenge
 
--Apache Stonehenge Team--
http://incubator.apache.org/stonehenge/

Microsoft has launched a new web site at http://www.wholoveswindows.com/websphere/ that highlights the results of a benchmark study they did on the costs of running the IBM Stock application on AIX and Windows Server 2008 and the equivalent .NET StockTrader application on Windows Server 2008. The results were very interesting. The .NET application came out on top as far as price and price/performance but I was surprised by the difference in cost and performance for the WebSphere applications.

Microsoft showed that the same WebSphere application running on commodity blade hardware cost about 66% less than on the mainframe and provides better performance. In these tough economic times that seems like a good way for IT departments to save some of their precious budget for new initiatives and expanding into new areas. Since it is WebSphere on both platforms there is no rewrite to port the application and the management and tuning should be very similar so I can see this being a huge win for IT shops.

Another surprising thing to me was the difference in the licensing costs for WebSphere on AIX and Windows. I would think they would be about the same but it appears the mainframe is much more expensive. If I were an IBM customer I would be questioning what the additional licensing costs buys me.

I will be attending an IBM conference next week and will see if I can find anyone who can answer that question.

Editors note: The original URL http://www.websphereloveswindows.com is no longer working. I have updated the article with the new URL http://www.wholoveswindows.com/websphere/ which is serving the same content.

Microsoft has posted the second video in the Web Service Champions series. In this round the champion (using WCF) is able to quickly adjust to a new requirement from the customer that the same web services support a REST interface. At the same time the challenger is yelling to his manager to “Give me the book!”.

So far it appears that Microsoft is taking the high road and not making fun of their competitors. I still like the videos and it will be interesting to see the next round. I saw a comment earlier today that if they go 18 rounds it will get boring but I suspect that the “fight” will be over soon.

You can view the high def version of the video on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRzyJuVOa4s or click here.

Microsoft has a new video on their WCF site at http://www.microsoft.com/net/wcf/champ/ that shows two competitors in a boxing ring fighting it out over the right way to create web services. I watched the video which is just over 2.5 minutes long. It is definitely part 1 (and judging by the site there will be 2 more) of a longer story so there isn’t really and ending (just the end of this round) but it does make some good points.

1. No unnecessary taunting (3rd rule from the referee so I guess necessary taunting is OK) :)
2. Using the WCF test client should speed up service development because you can visualize and test your service without having to build a client for it.
3. Java/AJAX frameworks get you started quickly but… (they never really said what was bad about it just that it is “old school” and traditional).

It is a different way to get the message across although I am not sure I get the whole boxing metaphor. Microsoft has spent a lot of time, money, and effort to make sure that web services are interoperable. Hopefully the boxing part evolves into something around “fighting” old habits that detract from your productivity and not into some sort of “we are better than our competitors” type of theme. I guess I will have to wait until the next round to see what comes of this.

I will give them a +1 for creativity. Instead of just linking to the resources they have a video. Don’t worry, the links to WCF, .NET StockTrader, and DinnerNow are on the web site.

I give them a –1 for the “share this” link on the site. On my machine it creates a new e-mail message with the subject “Play This!” and a link in the body. I would almost certainly delete this message as SPAM with a spoofed return address if I saw it come into my in box.

BTW if you just want to see the video it is available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y2aQ-A_AIs or just click play below.