Sun Shines On WS-* Integration



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February 1, 2007 —  (Page 1 of 2)
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.




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