Oracle Corp. announced last week that the latest version of its application server has passed the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition compatibility test suite and is now J2EE 1.4-compliant.
Steve Harris, vice president of Oracles Java Platform Group, in Redwood Shores, Calif., said that J2EE 1.4, “broadly speaking, is J2EE plus Web services” and that Oracle was instrumental in “pushing the interoperability of Web services to be a priority of J2EE 1.4.”
Oracle contributed a significant portion of the tests in the J2EE 1.4 suite, Harris said. “We thought it was important to get this developer preview out early so developers can have a leg up on developing service-oriented applications on J2EE,” he said.
Last September, Oracle provided an early-access version of its J2EE 1.4 developer preview, but the technology offered then was not fully compliant, Harris said. However, more than 25,000 developers have downloaded that code and become familiar with the direction Oracle is taking, he said.
Oracle is the third vendor to claim compliance with J2EE 1.4, while BEA Systems Inc., an industry leader in the space, has not. So far, only IBM, Sun Microsystems Inc. and now Oracle have J2EE 1.4-compliant offerings.
“Its something were very proud of,” Harris said. “Any notion that Oracle is anything other than a leader in delivering on the standards is removed from anybodys mind” by the delivery of the J2EE 1.4-compliant technology, he said.
However, BEA spokesman Erik Frieberg said, “Its no longer a race to be first to offer a preview version of the J2EE spec. Its important to realize that J2EE is only one of many important characteristics of [BEAs] WebLogic Server. J2EE defines some of the underlying machinery but is not the complete solution customers need to build and integrate enterprise applications.
“Many features, such as clustering, reliability, application security, application management, application integration, personalization, portal and the application framework, are not defined by J2EE specifications,” Frieberg said.
Meanwhile, BEA officials said the San Jose, Calif., company already supports Web services interoperability via support for SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), Web Services Description Language, Java Management Extensions, SAAJ (SOAP with Attachments API for Java) and JAX-RPC (Java API for XML-based Remote Procedure Calls), among other standards, in its WebLogic Server 8.1.
BEAs pattern has been to support the latest J2EE features in each new release of its platform, the officials said. So the company will support J2EE 1.4 in the next version of BEA WebLogic Server, they said.