Interoperability Expert Says Windows Azure Starter Kit for Java Doesn't Address the 'Real World Problems' of Cloud Developers

Who:

Wayne Citrin

CTO

JNBridge

(www.jnbridge.com)  

Citrin is Chief Technology Officer at JNBridge. He is the architect of JNBridge Pro and has been devoted to Java and .NET interoperability issues since .NET's beta days, more than nine years ago. Prior to co-founding JNBridge, Citrin was a leading researcher in programming languages and compilers and was on the Computer Engineering faculty at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He was a researcher at IBM's research lab in Zurich, Switzerland and has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in Computer Science. He has given presentations at JavaOne, Microsoft's TechEd and TechReady, and numerous academic and technical conferences.

What:

Java and the Azure Cloud

Microsoft has been promoting the use of Java in the Azure cloud, with the recent launch of "Windows Azure Starter Kit for Java." (http://preview.tinyurl.com/4hz2rp7). The intent of the new offering is to provide developers with tools for packaging and uploading Java-based web applications running on Tomcat or Jetty. However, the use cases for this offering are not realistic and, in some instances, "just don't work." The problem is that these examples are extremely constrained. While it may be possible to construct Java EE examples that work as demos, it is unlikely that any real Java EE apps, web-enabled or otherwise, can be migrated to the Azure cloud without drastic, impractical or even impossible, modifications to the underlying application servers in order to accommodate the networking issues.

Beyond technical issues in getting an app server to run on the Azure platform, developers need to ask why they would want to do this on a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), such as Azure, when it would be far simpler to run such an application on an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering such as Amazon EC2. It is one thing to say it can be done; it's another to actually want to do it, as opposed to the easier alternatives. The market seems to bear this out – a recent Forrester study shows that Eclipse (that is, Java) developers prefer Amazon EC2 or Google App Engine, while Visual Studio developers prefer Windows Azure.

Users will want to do things with Java on Azure, but not what the creators of the Azure Starter Kit for Java think they want to do. Rather than running a self-contained Java server in an Azure role, they will want to integrate their Java with the .NET code more directly supported by Azure.

How:

The industry needs interoperability solutions for IT organizations that need to integrate Java and Microsoft .NET applications running in the Cloud – especially as a high-performance alternative to existing web services protocols. Citrin outlines the level of support and approaches developers can take to call Java from .NET in the cloud. To read Wayne Citrin's full blog post on this topic please visit: (http://www.jnbridge.com/jn/blog/2011/04/26/java-in-the-azure-cloud/)

Contact:

For more information or to set up an interview with Wayne Citrin, please contact:

Christie Denniston

Catapult PR-IR

303-581-7760, ext. 13

([email protected])