Specifically, the announcement involves four sets of web services standards focused on messaging, metadata, security, and quality of service (QoS).
All of the technologies in question are supported by Windows Communications Foundation (WCF, a.k.a., Indigo), the ESB-like layer of the forthcoming Windows Vista platform.
In most cases, Sun is breaking little new ground in terms of the mix of web services standards that it said it would support.
For instance, over a year ago, Sun and Microsoft said they would collaborate on using WS-Management, WS-Addressing, WS-Metadata Exchange, WS-Federation and WS-Eventing specifications.
Although most of the specifications in question have already been or are making their way through the Oasis standards process, some are part of a stack promoted by IBM and Microsoft that have not been submitted to any formal standards body, such as WS-Policy, and consequently drawn universal embrace.
Because there are so many individual specifications covering security and reliability, they have often been collectively referred to as WS-* (Star).
The standards support is being undertaken under the umbrella of Glassfish, Sun’s open source Java appserver project. The results would be supported, no only in the Glassfish open source offering, but also Sun’s Java Enterprise Server (JES) platform edition, which is a superset.
Sun is currently part of a group of partners that are in Redmond this week to test their interoperability with WCF, and plans to put the tested stack into Glassfish within 6 – 8 weeks. By Java One next May, they hope to get the stack into formal beta stage.
