The Microsoft .NET application server that is incorporated in to Windows Server 2003 provides a robust, flexible, and secure environment for the deployment of enterprise applications on Intel platforms. By supporting a wide variety of other application environments, it provides the flexibility that enterprises require in order to make best use of their existing code base, to accommodate new business partnerships, and to leverage developer expertise most effectively. By supporting Intel® platforms, the .NET application-server environment provides IT managers the flexibility of choosing server equipment from a wide array of OEMs.

This article is focused toward the concerns of IT Managers and decision makers, and to a lesser extent, solutions architects and developers. It will demonstrate the .NET application server's robustness and forward-looking suitability for the deployment of large-scale enterprise applications. It particularly addresses issues of the .NET application server's interoperability with Java* and legacy technologies and introduces some of the capabilities that the next generation of Microsoft Visual Studio, code-named Whidbey, will bring to the application-server environment.

.NET application server interoperability with J2EE application servers
One key aspect of the interoperability of the .NET application server with Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) components is the full support for Web services standards by both the .NET application server and the major players in the Java application server market, including BEA WebLogic and IBM WebSphere. For a comparative introduction to all three of these application servers, see another article in this series, Overview of Enterprise-Class Application Servers.

By means of UDDI, SOAP and other Web-services standards, Web services components created in .NET and those created in Java can interoperate directly within a single application without being changed from their native environments. Thus a .NET application server can host an application that directly incorporates J2EE components from multiple Java application servers in the same enterprise or across the Internet.

Outside the Web services context, interoperability between .NET and Java application servers is also well-supported, albeit rather more complex. The fundamental challenge in providing interoperability between .NET and Java application servers lies in mapping data types from one platform to the other.

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