Sun does SOA dance

Sun Microsystems is developing SOA (service-oriented architecture) technology called Project Kitty Hawk, Sun officials said at the JavaOne Conference in San Francisco last week.

The company is also working on Project Disco, a set of tools that enable the building of SOAs through a visual paradigm.

According to Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO of Sun, Kitty Hawk will enhance the Sun Java Enterprise System server-based middleware platform to integrate Web services into SOAs. In general, SOAs loosely couple applications and data through Web services, allowing for modifiable architectures.

Kitty Hawk features will start to appear in Release 4 of Java Enterprise System, due at the end of the year. The full Kitty Hawk platform will be delivered throughout the next 18 months, beginning with the professional-services component unveiled at JavaOne last week, said John Loiacono, executive vice president of software at Sun.

Called SOA Readiness Assessment, the offering involves assessing where a customer stands with SOA and where that customer needs to go to accommodate it, Loiacono said.

Also included in Kitty Hawk are Sun Java Studio Creator — a new visual development environment for Java released last week — and the Java Studio Enterprise developer tool.

A Java user at the show endorsed the SOA concept and said his company has begun using Web services.

“From our viewpoint, we want to have a whole bunch of services and plug-ins to offer customers,” said Jim Niemann, president of QSAccess, which develops and hosts scheduling and appointment reminder applications for the optical retail market.

“The way to [provide customers with these services] is through Web services,” Niemann said.

Intended for developers building highly functional, high-end Web services, the futuristic Project Disco technology will use interactive object diagrams to help developers understand what is going on with their Web services, said Mark Hapner, Sun distinguished engineer and a Web services strategist at the company.

“We’re going to show some prototype technology making it much easier to develop Web services,” Hapner said in an interview at JavaOne.

Disco will be featured in Java Studio Enterprise as part of the Kitty Hawk rollout, with initial features coming out at the end of the year.

In targeting Project Disco toward users looking to implement SOAs, Sun is joining vendors such as IBM and BEA Systems to focus on this recent IT architecture paradigm.