Redhat joins Interop Vendor Alliance
Heise (a german IT news provider) reports that Redhat joined the Interop Vendor Alliance recently. I'd never heard of that alliance before, so I was curious and wanted to dig a little into this. I googled and didn't get a reasonable link on that and Heise seemed to be the only one with the announcement. So I clicked my browser to the site and had a look at the pages. Hm, the list of supporting companies (including my employer Sun) is quite large - if IBM and Oracle are joining the club, all major vendors are present. Other content? Not too much, just a few whitepapers. Let's click on the FAQs and surprise ... zero questions!?! Instead the following Information:
Alliance Mission Statement
The Interop Vendor Alliance community is designed to support these objectives:
- Encourage vendor collaboration to foster interoperability.
- Enable scenario-based testing for interoperability.
- Communicate vendor interoperability solutions to customers.
This sounded quite a bit too fuzzy to me.
Microsoft has founded the gremium and they have a history of vendor collaboration and interoperability:
- Visual J++ and Java in Windows (read more)
- Open server protocols and WSPP (read more)
- XPS vs. PDF (read more)
- Open XML vs. ODF (read more)
- last but not least: the browser war
This syndrom is by no way limited to Microsoft at all. PDF is a good Adobe story, iTunes would be Apple. My employer Sun probably also has had his issues, but I can't go into any
details here 
I'll leave it to the interested readers/commentators to
come up with some good examples.
Some other areas of my personal concern. Have you ever tried to:
- export a UML project from one Tool and import into a different Tool?
- use one single installed JRE for different pre-packaged software applications?
- connect WebServices based on Axis 1.x, Axis 2.x, different AppServers and .Net?
- tried to import non-trivial WSDL from one tool into another?
- work with two (or more) IDEs like Eclipse and NetBeans on the same project?
- integrate more than 5 tools from different vendors in a software project?
This is also not limited to software. E.g. I'm using all kinds of memory cards: CompactFlash and SD Cards for my iPAQ, xdCard for my Fuji Finepix and MemoryStick for my Sony Camera - yes, it's all about choice 
I'm definitely not going to buy two DVD-Players for HD-DVD and Blueray.
So I'm going to stop ranting now and make my contribution to the IVA:
Encourage vendor collaboration to foster interoperability.
I hereby encourage you vendors to improve interoperability! Get things going or I won't buy a new DVD player at all. (Hm, that probably doesn't falls under the IVA)
Enable scenario-based testing for interoperability.
OK, take following Scenario:
Open a UNIX text file in Windows Notepad and see, if you can read that without to much scrolling. Run a UNIX shell Script with DOS characters.
Communicate vendor interoperability solutions to customers
Glassfish and Spring seem to work together (look here). I didn't have the time to try that myself yet.
I also have some questions (as a starting point for the FAQs)
Is this a placebo strategic initiative targeted to confuse customers for marketing? Will this end up in everyone pating each others shoulder? Why aren't the big pure open source players in the boat? I'm missing some kind of roadmap on concrete activities. And in the end, why another interoperability consortium? Shouldn't the standardization organizations foster interoperability (ISO, IETF, OMG, OASIS, WSI, to name a few)?
Summary (a german joke, not very funny and poor translation):
Three germans meet on the street. What are they going to do next? ... They start a society or register a club.
Posted at 09:49AM Feb 14, 2007 by Armin Wallrab in Sun Related | Kommentare[0]