Sun Shines On WS-* Integration - Software Development Times On The Web

Sun Shines On WS-* Integration
By Alex Handy

February 1, 2007 — Chutzpah was the word most used to describe Sun Microsystems’ Redmond emissaries. When eight of Sun’s enterprise Java engineers flew up to Washington state to collaborate with Microsoft’s engineers, many industry watchers trotted out that venerable Yiddish word, which, loosely translated, means gall.

But as these two teams worked together to bring about some calm in the turbulent seas of Web services, they found that engineering knows no prejudice. The result, three years later, is Sun’s Web Services Integration Technology, and Microsoft has called it the best implementation of the WS-* standards outside of its own.

In 2004, Nicholas Kassem, Sun’s technology director for the enterprise Java platform, was given the task of understanding Microsoft’s new Web services specifications.

“Going back to about 2004 when we kicked off this effort, the real intent was to provide first-class interoperability between the Java platform of our products and [what became] the [Windows] Vista environment,” said Kassem.

When Kassem arrived in Redmond, the Web services specifications being worked on therein were still behind closed doors. Kassem said that a major part of his job was to advocate the opening of these specifications, a process that has subsequently taken place in the OASIS standards body.

While Kassem does not take credit for spurring Microsoft to open its specifications, he does take credit for identifying the specs that were most important to interoperability. The first of these was WS-Addressing. “[WS-Addressing] was really the first case in the Web services community of a formal way of referencing end points,” said Kassem.

Kassem went on to place bulls-eyes on a number of other WS-* specifications, targeting them for implementation on the Java side of the fence. These included WS-Policy, WS-Security, WS-Security-Policy, WS-Trust, WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Coordination and WS-Atomic Transaction. These specifications, Kassem decided, would most directly require interactions with non-.NET systems.

Since Kassem’s first trip to Redmond, Sun’s Project Tango has grown to include all of these and a few more WS-* specifications. Kassem’s team has built facilities for these protocols to interact with Java environments. So effective has Kassem’s team been that Microsoft has even praised Sun for creating the best implementation of the WS-* specifications outside of its own. This from the company many consider to be Sun’s arch nemesis.

CAN’T GET FOOLED AGAIN
Kassem said that his role in this high-profile project has been helped along by learning from prior Sun mistakes.

“We chose not to spin up JSRs around these,” said Kassem. “We wanted to preserve the investment our customers had made in technology that already had traction, such as JAX-WS and JAX-B. We didn’t want to turn interoperability with Vista into a whole new set of APIs to learn. So, for example, folks who are customers who have invested in EJBs—we didn’t want to have to introduce a whole new programming model so they could implement WS-Atomic Transaction and WS-Coordination.”

Another key to the success of Project Tango, said Kassem, was his insistence that tooling be available as soon as the interoperability code was released.

“Tooling typically lags,” said Kassem. “We didn’t want to repeat some of the things we’d done in the past. We wanted to make sure we had a good user experience on the tooling front, too. Within weeks of the Glassfish beta program, we were spinning up proof-of-concept activities,” said Kassem.

Much of Project Tango’s real-world experience has come from Glassfish, Sun’s next-generation application server. Kassem said that the WSIT capabilities in Glassfish are now mostly complete, and that his team is primarily working on bug fixes. The team’s NetBeans tooling, built specifically to deal with the

WS-* specifications, has helped to speed the deployment of these interoperability capabilities, said Kassem.

So, despite the years of bad blood between Sun and Microsoft, it would appear that their collaboration has been a success. Kassem deems it a success as well. “We’ve had a very amicable and good relationship. We’re pleased with the overall interaction models,” said Kassem. “Engineer-to-engineer interactions are always healthy. It’s been useful for us because we wanted to make sure we didn’t have paper-level interoperability; we have real-world product-level interoperability.”

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