Microsoft and Sun Microsystems are closing the gap between them in an effort to speed the adoption of service-oriented architectures (SOA), a Sun official said at the Web Services on Wall Street 2005 conference here.
Sun Distinguished Engineer Hal Jespersen said the long-time rivals have been steadily working on setting up federated identity management to increase interoperability, a large barrier to wide-scale adoption of Web services and SOAs.
En route to the breakthrough, which Jespersen called a meeting in the middle of traditional LDAP from Sun programmers and Active Directory from Microsoft engineers, the two companies have worked to pass Web services standards on addressing, eventing, metadata exchange and management.
