
Silverlight and Java Interoperability
Robert Bell, Microsoft, introduces interoperability scenarios for using Silverlight from Java and provides architectural guidance using sample code snippets.

Robert Bell, Microsoft, introduces interoperability scenarios for using Silverlight from Java and provides architectural guidance using sample code snippets.
Apache have released version 3.5 of the POI library for working with Microsoft Office documents. The latest version adds support for the OOXML format used by Office 2007 and higher. InfoQ spoke to Apache's Yegor Kozlov, release manager for POI 3.5, POI project founder Andrew Oliver, and Robert Duffner and Vijay Rajagopalan of Microsoft to find out more about the project.
Noelios Technologies, the France-based consulting services firm, is shipping a new version of the Restlet open source project, a lightweight REST framework for Java, that includes the Restlet Extension for ADO.NET Data Services. The effort is a collaboration between Microsoft and Noelios Technologies and it makes it easier for Java developers to take advantage of ADO.NET Data Services.
JNBridge, provider of Java and .NET interoperability tools, announced a new release of its core product, JNBridgePro, at JavaOne 2008.
When it comes to web services interoperability between .NET and Java, the choice used to be limited to SOAP over HTTP. Two new options recently became available in this area: WebSphere MQ (WMQ) and ActiveMQ transports can now be used for building interoperable web services between Java and .NET.

Office file manipulation used to be difficult, but since Office 2007, Word, Excel and Powerpoint files can be read and written without anything more complicated than the native JDK itself because Office 2007 documents are now nothing more than ZIP files of XML documents. Ted Neward demonstrates this in action.

A case study about how motor vehicle insurance records company Safeco used SOA approahes, SCA, BPEL, and composite application approaches to reuse legacy code, enable runtime modifiability thanks to decoupling, Java and .NET interoperability, and the ability to deliver a complex solution integrating over 5 systems in less than 8 weeks with a small team.

The merger of Lawson and Intentia in 2006 left developers with an important problem to solve - the integration and presentation of legacy applications and business services that are constructed in Java, .NET, and other technologies. This case study looks under the hood at the new architecture at Lawson and how they got there.

We learn how Java and .NET can interoperate with one another. We'll talk about how to leverage the strengths of each, such as using Microsoft Office to act as a rich client to a Java middle-tier service, or building a Windows Presentation Foundation GUI on top of Java POJOs, or even how to execute Java Enterprise/J2EE functionality from within a Windows Workflow host.

Learn about the re-launch of Major League Baseball’s website on Silverlight. With the website’s back-end written in Java and much of the user interface built with JSP, MLB.com is not your typical candidate for adopting Microsoft’s newest technology for building Rich Internet Apps. Henry Belmont and Thaniya Keereepart share the reasoning behind choice and implementation details.

Ted Neward talks about various ways Java and .NET can be used together focusing on examples of MS Office automation, and explains how various interop approaches (in-proc, messaging, web services) work and when to use them.