Stonehenge

The Apache Incubator has just voted to start a new Incubator podling, called Stonehenge. I'm the champion, so I'm taking this opportunity to explain it a little more.

Firstly, let's get this out of the way. This will be the first Apache Incubator project that has contribution from Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft. As well as Microsoft, Redhat/JBoss, Progress/Iona, Eviware, WSO2 and others have signed up to contribute. For those of you that didn't know, Microsoft already has two committers at Apache, and is a sponsor of Apache. I think this is a big step and I congratulate Microsoft on making it.

What is Stonehenge? The basic concept is to create a project that improves SOA interoperability through an Open Source model. The way we intend to do this is to create multiple implementations of the same application, and to ensure that they interoperate cleanly.

Let me give a concrete example, which is based on the first such application: Stocktrader. This application has separate components that talk to each other via Web Services. To demonstrate interoperability we are going to test each of these frameworks against each other. So part of the overall application might be running WSF/PHP, part Axis2/Java, part .NET WCF.

I expect this approach will get some interesting feedback. Most people think of Apache projects as a place to get a useful library or tool. But Apache members and committers think slightly differently - we think of Apache as a place where the community and process encourage good code. That is why we believe the Apache Incubator is the right place for this project - we believe that having many parties collaborate to create a set of interoperable applications that show best practice.

Of course, these applications won't all share code. Of course if several frameworks all use the same interface, say JAX-WS, then they may. But this project is not about sharing code, its about sharing standards and sharing interoperability.

If you want to hear more, Rich Bowen interviewed Kamaljit Bath and me at ApacheCon. You can hear the feathercast here. Kamaljit is a Program Manager from Microsoft's interop team and will be contributing to Stonehenge.

Finally, if you would like to get involved, we would welcome you. Please subscribe to the mailing list here: stonehenge-dev-subscribe@incubator.apache.org