Sun Microsystems and Microsoft are teaming up to make their rival camps play better. Today the two will announce new ways in which Java and Microsoft's .Net framework will cooperate in offering security, messaging, and quality of service in building enterprise services.

Sun will release as open-source code a set of Web services interoperability (WSIT) components to enable teams of developers from the opposing platforms to jointly build services for the enterprise.

The WSIT components will be placed with an open-source community to be maintained and further developed.

Microsoft and Sun engineers have collaborated to ensure that the components work with Microsoft's Windows Communication Foundation, says Rich Green, the new executive VP of software at Sun. The components implement new Web services standards coming out of the World Wide Web Consortium and the Organization for the Advancement Of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). In effect, Sun and Microsoft have come up with a protocol that both platforms now understand. "Both Windows Communication Foundation and Java understand those messages in an interoperable framework," says Kyle Young, program manger of the connected systems division at Microsoft.