Microsoft Pushes Interoperability at ApacheCon

Ramji said his team has been working closely with that of Jean Paoli, the general manager of Interoperability Strategy at Microsoft, whose team is driving much of this interoperability work.

In addition, Ramji said Microsoft has moved the development of protocol parsers for Microsoft Network Monitor—a free protocol analyzer and network sniffer known as "Netmon"—to an open-source model. Microsoft will host the effort on its CodePlex community development site. On CodePlex, Microsoft will host the development of parsers for public protocols and for protocols described in the company's Open Protocol Specifications for Windows, he said. An updated parser package has been released and a source tree created on CodePlex, Ramji said.

"We want Netmon to be the best-of-breed tool for network monitoring at Microsoft, not just for Windows," he said.

Ramji also told the ApacheCon audience that the company's "Oslo" software modeling technology will be included under Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise. "This will ensure that the 'Oslo' declarative modeling language, code-named 'M,' is interoperable with prominent industry standards such as WS* specifications, X M L formats, industry protocols and security standards," he said. 

Added Ramji:

Two of the core focuses for Oslo are integration and interoperability. As such, it will integrate with next-gen Microsoft technologies, including System Center, Visual Studio and BizTalk Server. We also plan to work with partners and the industry, so as to make Oslo interoperable with important standards and industry protocols. One of the key ways we think customers will achieve customization for their platforms is through the use of textual and visual DSLs  [domain-specific languages], which can be written uniquely by the developer for vertical industries and specific domains, or they can use pre-existing DSLs in these same scenarios. The hope is that we will establish a broad and open ecosystem around "M" that will enable customers to bring the power of model-driven applications and systems to their heterogeneous environments.

Also, Ramji said, on the Live Search front, Microsoft’s Powerset team recently resumed its participation with HBase, the Hadoop database, which is related to infrastructural storage technology enabling large-scale data processing. In July, Microsoft announced its acquisition of Powerset, a search and natural language company that is now part of the Microsoft Live Search team.

"The HBase project receives significant lift from the active community that supports the project, and Powerset's continued participation on HBase could allow us to accelerate the integration of Powerset's technology into Live Search, resulting in improvements to the end-user experience," Ramji said.