Now in its 6th year, the Sun-sponsored event is a gathering for developers who eat and sleep the language used for building flashy Web sites and applications for computing devices. Similar to the host of other tool kit releases here, the Web Services Pack relies on a collection of industry standards including support for XML, Simple Object Access Protocol and directory services including Universal Description and Discovery Initiative. The Web Services pack includes a new version of Tomcat, a reference implementation for Java designed through the Jakarta project at the Apache Software Foundation.
Tomcat is an open source project and free to developers.
The pack also contains the JAX Pack, a collection of Java APIs based on XML and JavaServer Faces, a toolkit for developing user interfaces for the server. It is available for download and will be retooled on a quarterly basis, Green said. As the major software vendors from Microsoft to IBM talk up Web services, Sun's efforts to bill Java as a simple and reliable method of building Internet-based applications that can be used in a Web services context couldn't come too soon, analysts note. Sun also delivered a set of tools that will make it easier to build Java applications for its Cobalt server appliance, a box that hosts and delivers Web pages. It includes Apache's Tomcat and Java Servlet technology.