Java creator Sun Microsystems has cancelled plans to join a Web-services alliance that IBM and Microsoft are forming. The last-minute revelation came yesterday, just hours before IBM and Microsoft officially announced the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WSIO), which includes a diverse group of competitive companies such as Accenture, BEA, Fujitsu Business Systems, Hewlett-Packard (HP), IBM, Intel, Oracle, and SAP. The alliance intends to create interoperability standards for Web services.
Sun, which originally expected to be among the initial group of companies joining WSIO, might eventually become a member of the organization, the company says. "Sun has been and will be committed to supporting industry standards as they emerge and evolve," a Sun spokesperson said yesterday. "WSIO is a good concept and bears looking into."
WSIO will work to standardize low-level Web-services technologies such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), XML, and Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) so that Web services from different platforms can work well together. Today two standards for Web services are emerging: Windows .NET and Java.
"\[WSIO\] is dedicated to two key goals," says Dan'l Lewin, vice president of Microsoft .NET Business Development. "First, WSIO wants to provide implementation guidance and education to accelerate customer deployments. Second, it will articulate and promote a common industry vision for Web-services interoperability to ease customer decision making, to grow market adoption of Web services, and to ensure the continued evolution of Web services technologies. WSIO \[will be\] active in three key areas: Web-services interoperability guidance and testing to accelerate customer deployments, Web-services profiles help with adoption and support for key Web-services standards, and a roadmap to help customers understand the long-term architectural directions of Web services."
