Summary

Interoperability at the presentation tier is a complex problem to tackle and often requires a complex solution. To achieve a user experience that allows pages and components from both .NET and J2EE to be delivered via a consistent and common interface requiresin most casesboth a shared session and shared authentication. The sample code in this chapter introduced these concepts and offered the beginnings of possible solutions for them.

There's great scope for using this sample code to create more production- worthy solutions, tailored to your own requirements. One such expansion of the session state sample code could be to develop the serializer so that it can store and retrieve complex objects of any type (currently, it serializes only Portfolio objects). Using the type column in the database object table to store the value, the serializer could automatically detect the type of the object to allow multiple types to be stored for the same session.

This chapter concludes our discussion of interoperability at the presentation tier. The next three chapters will concentrate on the new XML Web services specifications. Up next , Chapter 13, "Web Services Interoperability, Part 1: Security," looks at the WS-Security standard. The goal of these three chapters is not only to cover the specification, but to show some of these standards in action, especially while bridging the gap between the .NET and Java platforms.