Platforms in the enterprise will never be homogeneous. As much as any vendor would enjoy having their single development or application technology be exclusively adopted by customers, too much legacy, time, education, innovation and vertical business needs exist to make using a single platform practical. JAVA and .NET are the two industry application platform heavyweights and more often than not, business users are leveraging various systems in their day to day activities that incorporate applications developed on top of both platforms.

BEA Systems acquired Plumtree Software to complete their "liquid" view of data, stressing that regardless of a particular source system heterogeneous data could interoperate at not only through layers that allowed for data aggregation, but also at the "glass" or UI layer. The technical components that allowed the integration at the glass thrive today at Oracle, helping WebCenter to provide a rich composite application framework. Oracle Ensemble and the Oracle .NET Application Accelerator allow WebCenter to consume and interact with the UI layers provided by .NET applications and a series of other technologies. The beauty of the .NET accelerator is that it can consume any .NET application and act as a Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) producer.

I recently had a chance to leverage the .NET accelerator to expose a ASP .NET 2.0 (C#) application in the WebCenter UI (pictured above) and wanted to share a few tips to help others get started with similar integrations. I was using two virtual machines for the exercise - one with Windows Server 2003, running SharePoint and the other running WebCenter Spaces 11g. For my sample application data I ended up using SharePoint 2007 lists and calendars (MOSS 2007) to supply results using a .NET API for SharePoint.