IBM has released the Emerging Technologies Toolkit (ETTK), a software development kit for designing, developing, and executing emerging autonomic and Web service technologies with a SOAP engine and an embedded application server.

Version 2.3 of the ETTK contains implementations and demonstrations of recently published specification including WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Distributed Management, WS-Resource Framework, WS-Transactions, Generic Manageability Library (GeMaL), and WS-Agreement.

While it's great that IBM has released this toolkit, and it looks very impressive (especially considering that it's an emerging technology toolkit, as opposed to a formal product), what do you think of the stack it implements? Are web services too complicated to get right?

P.s.: once again IBM leverages the eclipse project and makes good use of it in order to simplify our lifes.
however it seems sometime strange to have dozens of installed eclipsed

the real pain with that standards is that they might _non_ do what we need, but anyhone dealing with distributed entities will surely have felt some of these needs.
WS-* standards are surely better then a pletora of less-then-incopatible implementations and/or extensions, so they are welcome.
ETTK is thus extremely useful since in order for the standards to be adopted we _absolutely_ need freely downloadable toolkits, so people may try and decide.
The fact that IBM is makeing that available free only for evaluationa nd not for production is not a problem with respect to this point.