Java developers can more easily link Microsoft .Net-based data through an interoperability bridge offered by France-based Noelios, Microsoft and Noelios announced last month.

The bridge is known as the Restlet Extension for ADO.Net Services and is featured as part of Noelios's Restlet 2.0 M5 open source framework. The bridge leverages Microsoft's ADO.Net Data Services, for building and consuming data services from the Web.

"It's really a simple way to connect a Java application to a .Net application" using REST technologies, said Jean-Christophe Cimetiere, senior technical evangelist at Microsoft, in an interview.

"For those who are relatively new to ADO.NET Data Services, it is a set of recently added .Net Framework features that provides a simple way to expose a wide range of data sources such as relational databases, XML files, and so on through a RESTful service interface," Cimitiere explained in a blog entry. Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 and the planned Visual Studio 2010 software development platform support ADO.Net Data Services.

"So far, beside client toolkits for Microsoft technologies such as .Net and Silverlight, only the PHP language had an to interact with those services. [W]ith the release of Restlet 2.0 M5</a>, we are proud to announce a similar offer for Java developers, cleanly leveraging the Restlet Framework," said Jerome Louvel, of Noelios, in a blog post. The technology is accessible at Restlet's Web page.

The Restlet Extension for ADO.Net Data Services provides a client API to extend the Restlet Framework core capability by providing remote access to data services hosted on ASP.Net servers on the Windows Azure cloud platform, Cimetiere said. The extension is not limited to working just with Azure, though, he said.

"Java developers use the extension's code generator to create Java classes that correspond to data entities exposed through ADO.Net Data Services," he said. "The Java application is then able to accesses the data via a simple method call. The runtime components in the Restlet engine and the extension take care of the communication between the Java client application and ADO.Net Data Services."

Java developers using the Restlet Extension for ADO.Net Data Services can connect applications to a .Net platform with "relative ease, which means more choices for Java developers and new opportunities for Microsoft," Cimitiere said.

He also cited several other interoperability projects to link Java to Microsoft, including Apache Stonehenge, for SOA and Web services interoperability; Azure .Net Services SDK for Java; and Eclipse Tools for Silverlight.

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