Sun Gives Solution Providers Early Access To Web Services Tools

Karen Shipe, product line manager for Java XML technologies for Sun, said the Java Web Services Developer Pack is now available for download at http://java.sun.com/webservices.

Sun joins other Java-based platform vendors, such as IBM, Oracle and BEA in giving developers access to tools to marry Java code and XML to compete with Microsoft's .Net strategy. Microsoft will officially launch its tools to help solution providers build Web services for the .Net platform, Visual Studio.NET, Feb. 13, in San Francisco.

Sun's Web services pack contains four Java APIs for XML--Java API for XML Processing, Java API for XML-based remote procedure calls (RPCs), the Java API for XML messaging and the Java API for XML registries. These APIs are standard ways for Java apps to communicate with XML-based data for each function defined by the API, said Shipe.

Shipe added that each of the APIs not only supports industry standards for XML such as WSDL, SOAP and UDDI, but also ebXML, an emerging standard for an XML-based framework for complex e-business transactions.

The Web Services Developer Pack also contains explicit tutorials for building Web services; a UDDI-based private registry for connecting trading partners; a Java Server Pages (JSP) tag library; and an Apache Tomcat JSP application servlett container, an open-source, low-level application server for building and deploying Java-based apps, said Shipe.