Sun Microsystems said last week that it plans to join the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), a consortium of companies working to make emerging Web services products compatible, as only a contributing member. The move is a reversal of the company's previous stance that it would join the group only as a board member so as to be on equal footing with IBM and Microsoft.

"Sun has received requests from many parties to participate in WS-I, and the new board member positions allowed us to reconsider our original stance and join the organization," said Mark Herring, senior director for Java Web Services at Sun Microsystems, in a statement. "

Read Sun joins WS-I and Sun to step aboard Web services group.

When is SUN going to pick a direction and stance and hold it up? Did SUN have the Java community's best interests in mind when they held back? If so, why move forward now?

Dave Wolf
Personified Technologies LLC

Heh the M$ trolls are so happy !!! But is . By the way this Pet Store is over kill to be written in EJB I think the Middleware people know that just try this with servlet, and datasource and see how it does. I bet then Java will be faster. Using precompiled store proc in Database does help a lot that what .Not used. One more thing I dont think either WAS or BEA runs on JDK 1.4 and if you force it like you did it here then it would have issues. I dont think there is any major vendor that supports jdk 1.4 for their EJB container I would like this to be answered by the Middleware people to prove me wrong.

Jamie,
  Sun's Sun ONE application server 7 runs on jdk 1.4 flawlessly. In fact, it requires jdk 1.4 and higher to run. I have been testing it for few months now.

Thanks
keith

And what does any of this have to do with WS-I?

Dave Wolf
Personified Technologies LLC

Oracle9iAS 9.0.3, released about 2 weeks ago, supports JDK 1.4:

http://otn.oracle.com/docs/products/ias/doc_library/903doc_otn/unix.903/relnotes/config.htm#1030905

Mike.

What the f*** does anything you guys are saying have to do with the issue? You guys have a talent for f***ing things up!!!
Address the issue: SUN JOINING WS-I

Personally, I think this is great. Why? b/c I work in a big corporate shop, and part of it is MS and part of it is IBM WAS (although we will be continually evangelizing the virtues of JBoss :-). I think that IBM collaborating with MS could be seen as a good thing or a bad thing. For Java developers who use IBM tools (WAS, or even tools that have been incubated at IBM and then open sourced, e.g. Apache SOAP, Axis, etc.). The bad thing, at least most poignantly for me, was that Sun didn't move fast enough in the beginning. Hopefully, they will correct this through joining groups such as WS-I. If interoperability is a major benefit of web services (it is isn't it?), then the technology behind the implementations should stand or fall on their own.

I don't think that Sun really had a choice. They could go off on their own and really muck things up by providing APIs folded into the next version of J2EE or J2SE that don't interop out of the box, or work closely with others and make it easy for developers to focus more on the business problems at hand that we are all trying to solve through <strong>their original technology</strong>. JMHO, but personally, I would love to see Sun lose more of a tight hold on the Java language as well.

Jin *sticking my head into the cardboard hole, awaiting the rotten tomatoes :-)*

Sun should have never been left out and truly should be invited as one of the board members but given that politics pervailed and that did not happen, Sun should have joined WS-I, the first chance it got. That would have been the right thing for Java. Its better late than never though.

I don't think politics prevailed as much as Sun just wasn't very interested in Web Services at first. They got interested in Web Services late, more in a "me too" kind of way, after lots of other companies got involved. I really don't see why they thought they would get on the board anyway after such a luke warm approach.

I can see why they were reluctant to join...
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-912906.html

Sun moving in will have good and bad effects:

As we know that on Java technology which is a main birdstone that kills .Net bird all the time, Microsoft will definitely abuse the WS-I membership dominance on disgracing Sun Java in the first place. Hopefully Sun will have a shield on this matter.

Apart from application development, platform war could also be another issue happened in WS-I. Linux is a big thread to Microsoft, seeing recently released SAS 7, but without Linux platform support, would be a start of Microsoft to abuse WS-I status on future Web Services invention to abort Linux platform supporting and also targeted to dismiss the platform non-advantaged position.

What do your think about it?

Oh... yeah, please do not post warfare story about which vendor release J2EE 1.4 products. Thanks alot!

Neo Gigs
"Follow the white rabbit..."

we dont care about that; I dont care about Sun.
Sun is dead ; or it should dead in few years