JavaOne: Sun to bake Web services into J2EE

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By Paul Krill and Tom Sullivan

(IDG) -- Facing stiff competition from Microsoft's .NET platform, Sun Microsystems this week will detail its forthcoming J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) 1.4 specification and a second prerelease version of its Web-services developer pack.

Speaking at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco, executives will announce that the J2EE 1.4 specification supports the full Web services stack, but will not be available for deployment until the first quarter of 2003.

Added support for SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration), and WSDL (Web Services Description Language) rounds out J2EE's support for the set of de facto Web service standards as 1.3 already supports XML. "It fully and completely implements standards-based Web services," said George Grigoryev, senior product manager for J2EE at Palo Alto, Calif.-based Sun.

Sun is also moving to accelerate developers' ability to build and deploy Web services using the J2EE 1.3 specification, with the availability this week of a second prerelease version of its Web services developer pack.

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In addition, the company is merging its JCA (J2EE Connector Architecture), JMS (Java Messaging Server), and Entity Beans to help companies make legacy data available via the Web services model, executives report.

But Sun's position in the Web services race is not only drawing fire from Microsoft, it now places Java developers in a position of choosing which specification to adopt.

"[Until the release of J2EE 1.4] you have a situation where Java developers have to work in potentially non-standard ways to support Web services, which isn't necessarily a terrible thing if you're working with one of the major vendors' tools suites like IBM, Sun, or Oracle," said analyst Dwight Davis, vice president at Summit Strategies, in Kirkland, Washington.

"All [these vendors] support fairly automatic generation of compliant code," backing standards such as SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI, said Davis.

A Microsoft official, however, was quick to pan Sun's efforts. "Fundamentally, the Web services support Sun is adding to J2EE is simply an example of too little, too late," said Tony Goodhew, product manager of the Microsoft .NET framework in Redmond, Washington.

"All of the major players in the J2EE space have already defined their ways of doing Web services and are off pushing their customers to go and use it, effectively locking Java developers into their plans," Goodhew said. "J2EE is simply yesterday's technology. The world has moved on to XML Web services. That's why we moved on to the .NET framework."

Microsoft has had "an incredible amount of interest" from companies that are looking to replace their Java technology with .NET, Goodhew added. One such company is CafePress.com, a San Leandro, California-based vendor of merchandising services on the Web that has redeployed its site on .NET.

"We were fighting compatibility [issues with Java] constantly. Mostly, things would just kind of break," said Fred Durham, CEO of CafePress.com.

But Java is not without a comeback as users can still develop Java-based Web services today without J2EE 1.4. Platform vendors such as IBM enable developers to incorporate all the emerging Web services standards into existing tool sets.

Automatic Data Processing (ADP), in Roseland, New Jersey, is one company using IBM's WebSphere application server and Visual Age development tools to build integrated human resources, self-services, and portal applications based on Java. The portal will enable employees to look at their paychecks through integration via Web services, said Yen-Ping Shan, ADP's vice president of Internet and client/server product development.

"Instead of having the portal team that would code the application that would access the payroll information, the payroll system would expose a Web service for the portal to call and get the necessary information," Shan said.

IBM is not alone in moving ahead with enabling developers to build Java-based Web services without J2EE 1.4 support. For example, Dublin, Ireland-based Iona will unveil at JavaOne Web services integration features throughout its Orbix E2A product set.

"We're bringing to market early some of the functionality," said Simon Pepper, product director at Iona and a member of the Java Community Process executive committee, which oversees the Java standards process.

For its part, HP intends to roll out J2EE 1.4 support over the course of this year to take advantage of standardized specifications describing Web services for Java, said Shaun Connolly, director of product management for the HP middleware division in Mount Laurel, New Jersey.

"What [Version 1.4] does is it provides a layer of consistency and simplifies how people are going to be interacting with Web services, so it nails down how Web services are built on top of the J2EE platform," Connolly said.

Meanwhile, Oracle continues to firmly back Java. "Most people looking at Web services are looking at J2EE and not .NET," said John Magee, senior director of Oracle9iAS product marketing, in Redwood Shores, California. "The key point is [Java-based] Web services are for real business use as opposed to the consumer use Microsoft trots out now and then," he said.

ADP's Shan said his company is delving into both Java and .NET, arguing it is more important that Web services built on either platform can be integrated. "The point is not which one is superior," Shan said.

Summit Strategies' Davis concurs. "What matters is, at the end of the day, the Web services you create should be able to interoperate with each other. The importance is the end result more than the process of how you achieved it," Davis said.