News

Sun pushes to join Web services battle

• By John K. Waters
• April 2, 2002

Web services was a hot topic at last week's seventh annual gathering of Java jocks, held at San Francisco's Moscone Center three months earlier than in past years, reportedly due to a scheduling snafu. The JavaOne crowd was noticeably smaller than previous conferences, but Sun officials said 2002 attendance more than met expectations.

Sun outlined several plans for Web services during the conference, including the availability of the second early access release of the Java Web Services Developer Pack (WSDP). The Java WSDP includes a set of Java APIs for building Web services, and a Web development starter set that includes JavaServer Pages, Standard Tag Library 1.0 Beta 1, Apache Tomcat 4.1-dev Container, Java WSDP Registry Server 1.0 EA2, the Ant Build Tool 1.4.1 and a Web Application Deployment Tool.

Sun officials also used the JavaOne platform to disclose first shipment of the beta version of its J2EE Application Verification Kit (AVK). Sun said the kit can help developers verify whether applications are J2EE compliant. The AVK incorporates a suite of more than 15,000 tests, both static, which examines code, and dynamic, which evaluates code execution on the application server. Results are summarized through a reporting tool, which generates detailed logs. Code that doesn't adhere to the J233 1.3 core specification is flagged.