Interoperability Overview

Portability Versus Interoperability

There is a distinct difference between portability and interoperability. In its simplest definition, portability specifies how easy it is for application assemblers and deployers to move components from one container to another. The other container might be from the same or a different vendor. The greater the portability, the easier time you will have switching to other containers or other vendors .

Interoperability , as it relates specifically to J2EE and EJB, is concerned more with how easy it is for the components within a container to communicate with components in other containers. These other containers might be EJB containers running on the same platform, or they could be objects running in a Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) container on a Unix workstation, for example.

As you can see, portability and interoperability are different problems that are both complex issues to deal with. However, both are extremely important to organizations building enterprise applications. You can't afford to build application components or services if they can't be moved effortlessly to another container environment or can't communicate with the rest of the enterprise's services.