Sun ONE Web Services Aim to Ease Java Development

Sun Microsystems Inc. has announced a series of technologies and initiatives to help developers build applications and Web services more effectively and enjoy a better overall development experience.

At the Web Services Edge East conference in Boston this month, Sun announced its Sun ONE Web Services Platform Developer Edition, consisting of Suns integrated development environment for building Web services, a portal server, a network identity server, an application server and Suns integration server, said Roger Nolan, senior director of Web Services Integration at Sun.

Nolan said Sun will start a six-month promotion April 1 in which the Santa Clara, Calif., company will sell what amounts to more than $36,000 in software for around $1,000.

The product supports integration technologies including Java 2 Enterprise Edition Connector Architecture and Java Messaging Service, as well as all the APIs in Suns Java Web Services Developer Pack. Future versions will support Suns JBI (Java Business Integration) technology—also announced at the conference—and the Web Services-Interoperability Organizations basic profile, Nolan said.

"Theyve figured out that Web services is indeed strategic for them, but they have no idea how to capitalize on that," said Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, a Cambridge, Mass., market research company.

One user said he likes to choose, rather than have an integrated stack.

"Im more for putting together a best-of-breed-type environment where I might use, say, [Borland Software Corp.s] JBuilder for development, BEA [Systems Inc.s WebLogic] for the app/portal server [and so on]," said John Zukowski, president of JZ Ventures Inc., a Boston-based Java consultancy.

INSIDE SUN ONE Top features of Developer Edition Application Server Standard Edition (includes Java Web Services Developer Pack) Portal Server Identity Server Integration Server EAI Edition Studio Enterprise Edition for Java Portlet Builder Connector Builder Support for Web services standards Future support for Suns JBI JSR and WS-I Web services protocols

"While the integration of everything in one tool is nice, there tends to be at least one weak link in there where you want to use something different for," Zukowski said.

Meanwhile, Sun also announced an expansion of its developer community with the launch of its Sun Developer Network, said Sanjay Sarathy, director of Suns developer program office.

"Even before we put these enhancements into place, we saw a 55 percent growth" in the Sun developer program as it stood before the announcement, Sarathy said. He said about 3 million people have registered for Suns developer program.

Finally, Sun formally announced this month a new business integration infrastructure standard, the Sun JBI specification. JBI is also known as JSR (Java Specification Request) 208, which has been submitted to the Java Community Process for approval.

The standard defines an architecture for integrating data and applications in a Java Web services environment. And Sun officials said they expect several companies to implement the standard.

JBI borrows from existing integration technologies and will feature some new technologies as well.