Iona Technologies has announced that Artix, the company's Enterprise Service Bus, has successfully demonstrated reliable and transactional interoperability with Microsoft's Windows Communication Foundation using Web services.

WCF is the communications platform for Microsoft's upcoming Vista operating system. Based on a Web services foundation, WCF extends Microsoft's .Net Framework to enable developers to build secure, reliable and interoperable Web services and is part of WinFX, Microsoft's managed code programming model included with Vista.

Click here to read more about the Windows Communication Foundation.

Eric Newcomer, Dublin, Ireland-based Iona's chief technology officer, said the interoperability between Artix and WCF will enable customers to capitalize on the promise of SOA (service-oriented architecture), which is to deploy Web services and SOA within heterogeneous IT environments that will work across multiple platforms.

Iona proved its interoperability with WCF at a recent Microsoft Interop Plug Fest, which is an event to test for interoperability between WCF and other Web services platforms. The event, held in March, was described in a Microsoft document as: "An interop plug-fest to test for interoperability issues between multi-vendor Web services products including Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) from Microsoft. This event is for hands-on interoperability testing by developers implementing the WS-* specification."

Meanwhile, in a statement, Iona's Newcomer said: "For Global 2000 customers, a successful enterprise SOA requires that disparate applications be integrated reliably, securely, and transactionally, regardless of their underlying platforms. Artix allows this to be done. Through our recent participation in Microsoft's Interop Plug Fest, we have demonstrated that Artix provides customers with SOA infrastructure software that can seamlessly incorporate applications built on the Microsoft platform into any IT environment."

Iona officials said Iona successfully demonstrated Artix interoperability using SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)1.1, WS ReliableMessaging 2005/02, WS-Addressing 2004/08, WS-AtomicTransactions 2004/10 and WS-Coordination 2004/10.

"Interoperability is vital to today's successful organizations looking to interact with customers and partners in new and valuable ways," said Ari Bixhorn, director of WinFX Strategy for Microsoft, in a statement. "We are pleased with the interoperability results and excited to see Artix communicating with WCF using the WS-* Web services protocols."

Meanwhile, as Iona is proving its ability to work with Microsoft's upcoming Web services and SOA platform, the company also is leading an effort to build an open-source ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), known as Celtix, which is based on Iona's Artix technology. Iona is leading the effort in the Eclipse Foundation's SOA Tools Platform Project.

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.