Java EE and .NET Interoperability: Integration Strategies, Patterns, and Best Practices

Enterprise Service Bus

Enterprise Service Bus is becoming more popular in implementing Java EE .NET interoperability. It supports both synchronous and asynchronous communication. It also persists asynchronous messages for better reliability. It allows priorities to route or process certain tasks first. With an Enterprise Service Bus, architects and developers can centrally maintain security using the bus to apply business or security policies (such as Policy Decision Point or Policy Execution Point).

Metrics for QoS

There is no standard for measuring the QoS for Java EE .NET interoperable applications today. Having a single performance metric for them is difficult and may not be appropriate because we are not sharing the same measurement baseline. In other words, it is not an apple-to-apple comparison. For Java EE .NET interoperability, it is more pragmatic to measure the performance throughput for different interoperability strategies using the same client platform and infrastructure, for example, comparing the system response time of using an IIOP bridge and Web services for the same set of system infrastructure.

Performance metrics specifications exist, but they are specialized for specific technologies such as application server (for example, SPECjAppServer from http://www.spec.org/benchmarks.html) and TPC-App from the TPC (http://www.tpc.org/tpc_app/default.asp). The performance throughput for Java applications can be measured using these specificationsbut not for .NET applications. However this is not sufficient for end-to-end measurement for Java EE .NET interoperable applications.

Management of Web Services

Web services technology is a key Java EE .NET interoperability strategy. Web services management can help monitoring and managing Web services end-points and can take appropriate corrective actions to meet service-level objectives. Please refer to Chapter 15 for details.

There is a convergence of WS-Management efforts between industry leaders including Sun Microsystems and Microsoft. OASIS Web Services Distributed Management Technical Committee (http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=wsdm) has recently approved a couple of Web services management standards, namely, management using Web services (MUWS) and management of Web services (MOWS). These specifications define the requirements of how to meter and manage Web services end-points and should be applicable to both Java EE or .NET applications.

Other Web Services Standards and Specifications

Web Services Reliable Exchange (WS-RX) is a specification that continues the work of WS-ReliableMessaging. It is based on Web Services Reliable Messaging Policy Assertion to allow two Web services to express support for reliable messaging and other related useful parameters. Refer to http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=ws-rx for more details.