The company will also announce a launch date for the developer edition of its next application server, version 8.0, which for the first time is founded on the J2EE Reference Implementation (RI).
A source at one leading J2EE ISV said he believes this specification is not as revolutionary as version 1.3 popular today, which bundled number of key APIs for messaging and integration. Much of the J2EE infrastructure has already been laid down.
Sun called this release pretty exciting, thanks to use of web services and compatibility with the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) Organization’s Basic Profile 1.0. The desire for compatibility saw J2EE 1.4 delayed when the WS-I’s own work hit problems.
The company believes it is now poised to monetize Java using J2EE 1.4 in products. The company lags leaders in many sections of the J2EE market.
By adopting the J2EE 1.4 RI, Sun believes it can become the volume leader in application server downloads – the company claims there have been three million RI downloads. The company has also changed the RI’s licensing terms, permitting customers to actually deploy the software.
Sun hopes it can both up-sell customers from the base application server to versions that include advanced features like clustering while also provide a platform for developers to enhance its products.
The company’s primary target in the developer space is open source J2EE application server JBoss.
This article was based on material originally published by ComputerWire.
