Sun ONE Products
Sun's initial Web service focus will be on B2B, including corporate portals and integration of large organizations (such as supply-chain vendors). Don't look for consumer Web services like Microsoft HailStorm; Sun is planning to deliver a platform that allows businesses to create their own Web services. One exception to this is Sun ONE Webtopa Web services version of StarOffice.
The iPlanet Integration Server, B2B Edition ($40,000 per CPU), has recently been improved with support for Web services. This product (a counterpart to Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000) can integrate disparate systems through XML. It adds SOAP support, as does a new version of iPlanet Application Server (Enterprise Edition, $19,995 per CPU). Supporting products include a messaging server, iPlanet Message Queue for Java ($4,000 per CPU).
The corporate portal is an important focus for Sun's strategy. The company expects Web services to be used for security and role-based personalization in iPlanet Portal Server. This sounds similar to Microsoft Passport in that Web services will be used to authenticate and personalize content. But for Sun, identities and preferences might be maintained in corporate LDAP directories at first, rather than UDDI, which will be used in the mid- to long-term future for locating and describing Web services. Sun expects LDAP to be even more critical in the short term, as corporations strive to integrate their own organizational data stores and with those of trading partners.
For developers, Sun's Forte for Java, Enterprise Edition, an integrated development environment, has recently been Web serviceenabled, with wizards to automate the creation of XML (see the sidebar "Tools for Building Web Services"). The company is also working with third-party Java tool vendors, such as Borland, IBM, and WebGain, to ensure that Web service wizardry is bundled into future Java tools.
Sun's Java platform has already overcome many of the problems of effective distributed computing. The company's vision of network computing would seem to be a natural fit for the brave new world of Web services. In this view, they're more evolutionary than revolutionary.
Thanks to a quick response from its partners, there's every indication that the Java platform is ready to roll with Web services. Understandably, it will take about a year for XML and SOAP APIs to appear in the J2EE standard. In the meantime, IT shops running Sun ONE can choose Java-enabled iPlanet and third-party tools to move forward with Web services without a huge investment in developer expertise.
The bottom line is that no developer will have to write those XML SOAP wrappers by hand. And as new APIs make their way into Java in 2002, it should become even easier to develop Web services on the Sun platform.