Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems and a co-inventor of XML, is advocating REST (Representational State Transfer) as a way to bolster integration between different computing platforms.In an interview at the RailsConf 2007 event in Portland, where REST has been a prominent subject, Bray said the Ruby on Rails community and others as well need to focus on integration. Rails is hot stuff, he said. But Java is not going away nor are platforms such as .Net and PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). “What we need to be able to build is apps that run across all these [systems] and that remains a problem that is substantially unsolved,” said Bray, who plans to make these same points in a keynote presentation on Saturday. The WS-* (pronounced ws star) stack has failed to solve the problem of interoperability, said Bray. REST presents a better approach, Bray said. He is not alone in supporting REST. David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Ruby on Rails framework, also believes in the technology. Incidentally, Hansson pans WS-*, too. “I think there’s not enough emphasis across the whole spectrum of IT in integrating with other systems,” Bray said. “We’re starting to see an emerging consensus that the best bet for that kind of stuff is based on REST architecture and Web-style computing,” Bray said. REST has provided the basis for the World Wide Web, he said. But tools are needed for REST, he said. Bray, however, did give a nod to Microsoft’s Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) technology for forging interoperability with Windows systems. WCF features a subset of WS-* technology, Bray said. “Talking to WCF is hard. It’s cost us a huge investment to make the Java stack talk to it,” said Bray. He envisions a link between WCF and REST, also. In the Ruby and Ruby on Rails spaces, Bray noted Sun efforts such as employing the lead developers of JRuby, which is an implementation of Ruby for the Java Virtual Machine. Ruby and Ruby on Rails support also is being built into the NetBeans open source tooling platform that Sun shepherds. An optimized version of Ruby for the Solaris OS also is planned, Bray said. Software Development