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As the move to service-oriented architectures continues to pick up its pace, vendors are jockeying to get their messages out on how they will help customers implement SOAs.
Sun Microsystems Inc., of Santa Clara, Calif., is placing a lot of focus on the Java Business Integration (JBI) specification, also known as Java Specification Request (JSR) 208, as the key to its SOA strategy, said Mark Hapner, a Sun distinguished engineer and a primary architect of the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE).
“Sun sees [JBI] as a very important way to realize the ability to bring SOAs into the Java platform,” Hapner told eWEEK in an interview.
At TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas earlier this month, Hapner delivered a presentation titled, “Extending the Java Platform with SOA.”
Hapner described SOA as “this acronym you have to mention now if youre doing application integration.” But he said “Sun believes that there is actually a there there in the SOA approach.”
“Sun believes that at the center of what impacts the developer is WSDL [Web Services Description Language] 2.0 Message Exchange Patterns,” Hapner said, adding that the MEP impact is that “this is the first layer at which SOA and Web services impact the developer—and this is separate from all the work going on down at the protocol level.”
JBI enables enterprises to implement an SOA policy that features an aggregation of services—what Hapner refers to as an SOA cloud.
The JBI effort is ongoing. Formed last year to oversee development of the JBI specification, the JBI Expert Group is now developing a draft of the specification and is expected to deliver a final version by the end of the year.
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