Sun Heightens SOA Efforts with Kitty Hawk, Disco Projects

Sun's SOA strategy comes in the form of two new projects, code-named Kitty Hawk and Disco. SOAs allow applications and components to run as services that can invoke other apps or components in a distributed system. The architecture promises to trim the development, deployment and operational costs of IT systems.

Unveiled in a keynote Monday morning, Kitty Hawk is an 18-month product to add SOA technologies to the Java Enteprise System (JES), said John Loiacono, Sun's executive vice president of software.

The first stage of Kitty Hawk is a new professional services offering from Sun Services that assesses customers IT infrastructure to determine how developers can architect SOAs by leveraging existing resources, Loiacono said.

Eventually, by release 4 of JES, Sun will have a coherent strategy for integrating its developer tools and middleware more tightly together to help developers and solution providers build SOAs, he said. JES is currently in release 2.

Loiacono said Kitty Hawk will unify the roles of both corporate developers rapidly building Java-based GUIs and enterprise developers building back-end logic. "We're leveraging what we have done with JES to take that to extreme level," he said. "By release 4 of JES we will get to an integrated package, end to end, combining middleware with development products."

Sun also is working on a composite application development tool, code-named Disco, sources told CRN Monday at JavaOne. While details on the project were sketchy Monday afternoon, Sun planned to demonstrate the new tool in the conference pavilion Monday night.