Geek 2.0

It’s been a long time since Sun and Microsoft announced their partnership. First resulting are now appearing furing the JavaONE conference.
Beside the traditional web services interoperability, made possible through the use of JAX-WS (formerly called JAX-RPC) and Indigo, I saw a mich more impressive demo : server management through WS-Management
If you are not familiar with Sun hardware, you must know that our machines have a BIOS allowing some basic maintenance and diagnostic tasks as soon as the machine is powered up, before any OS is started.
That being said, WS-Management allows to remotely manage heterogenous hardware using standardized web services interfaces and calls. Using Microsoft’s Operation Manager 2005 GUI, the demo showed how remotely diagnose Sun’s server, stop them, restart them … all this using web services calls.
Very impressive ! I can ensure Sun and Microsoft are serious when talking interoperability.