WS02 offers open source app server sans J2EE stack

June 12, 2006—WS02 is offering an open source application server, which, unlike that of its rivals, is not based on a J2EE stack, but instead focuses on XML and Web services.

Geared for SOA (service-oriented architecture) deployments, the WS02 Tungsten application server supports core specifications for Web services as well as REST (Representational State Transfer). Tungsten is built on the Apache Axis2 Web services foundation, which WSO2 helped develop.

“Basically, our focus is building an application server that lets you host business logic and the way that you expose business logic to the world is through Web services and XML interfaces,” said Sanjiva Weerawarana, chairman and CEO of WSO2.

“There’s a significant disconnect between what the J2EE stack wants and what the Web services stack wants,” Weerawarana said.

A J2EE stack features technologies such as JAX (Java API for XML) and JMS (Java Message Service). “It’s a completed, powerful stack, but when you’re doing Web services, that stack is not in sync with what the Web services technologies need,” Weerawarana said.

Ironically, the initial version of Tungsten, available now, is for Java programmers. Releases planned for C and PHP developers are due in August. Tungsten features an Ajax-based (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) administrative console that uses RSS to send alerts.

With Tungsten, WSO2 is offering a different twist on application servers, an analyst concurred.

“What WSO2 is doing with their non-J2EE app server is new in that it’s built from the ground up to support Web services implementations. J2EE comes with a lot of baggage from the pre-SOA days, since it’s fundamentally based on the code portability value proposition of Java,” which is Write-Once, Run-Anywhere, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, in an email.

“SOA, however, is based on services, which are ‘write-once, access-anywhere’,” Blooomberg said.

WSO2, which has offices in Sri Lanka, Boston, and the United Kingdom, plans to offer an open source middleware platform. The company plans to release an enterprise service bus named Titanium in the third quarter of this year and a server-side mashup and service composition platform called Tellerium in the second quarter of 2007.

Unlike other ESBs, Titanium will not be a rebranded JMS platform, Weerawarana said. It will mediate XML and MTOM (Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism) communications.

Tungsten is available via an Apache license, which will be the case with all WSO2 products. The company will sell support services for Tungsten, with prices starting at ,000 for one- to two-server deployment for one year.