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WSIT Components Are Made Available
Sun and Microsoft showcase Web Services Interoperability Technology as the next step in simplifying development for cross-platform environments.
by Terrence O'Donnell

JavaOne, May 16, 2006

Another big step toward the fulfillment of Web services interoperability between the Java platform and the .NET Framework marked the opening of the 2006 JavaOne conference in San Francisco. Sun Microsystems Inc. along with Microsoft Corp. announced the availability of a set of WS-* components, called Web Services Interoperability Technology (WSIT), that is focused primarily on security, messaging, quality of service, and metadata support. Both companies shared the stage during the conference's opening keynote session to give attendees a brief demo of the technology.

Available currently in early-access form, WSIT will be implemented in several different Java Enterprise System products (Java Enterprise System is Sun's branded middleware stack for software). Sun plans to deliver the WSIT functionality throughout the year, and ultimately intends to standardize it on the Java platform too. The project is also part of the open source GlassFish project that is hosted on Java.net.

"These technologies were developed through close collaboration by Sun and Microsoft engineering teams and represent pretty tangible evidence that we are in fact making significant progress in working together to resolve interoperability issues for customers," said Ed Julson, director of engineering for Web services technologies at Sun. "This is very much a customer-driven perspective. We have a lot of customers that have both Sun and Microsoft environments in play, and we think it's a major step forward, specifically in context of Web services technologies, to try to bridge that gap."

Julson and Kyle Young, program manager in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft, noted that the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a significant interoperability framework on the Microsoft side that implements a wide range of the WS-* specifications, which are Web services specifications that go well beyond just the basic messaging layer and get up into a higher level of functionality around quality of service, security, metadata management, and some extensions to the messaging layer.

"We'd like to make sure that the Java platform and that Java developers in general can write service endpoints that work right out of the box with that very important direction in terms of where Microsoft is going," Julson said. "We focused on a number of technologies and specifications in the WSIT implementation that align with the Windows Communication Foundation."

The set of specifications included in WSIT comprise:

• WS-Reliable Messaging
• WS-Coordination
• WS-Transactions
• WS-Security
• WS-Trust
• WS-Secure Conversation
• WS-Security Policy
• WS-Policy
• WS-Metadata exchange
• WSDL
• XML Schema
• WS-Addressing
• SOAP
• Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM)