At JavaOne in San Francisco today, Sun Microsystems announced Project Kitty Hawk, a new initiative encompassing expanded service-oriented architecture (SOA)-enabling capabilities in Sun products including the Sun Java Enterprise System and Sun Java Studio Enterprise developer tools, as well as a new SOA Readiness Assessment offering from Sun Services.

Project Kitty Hawk is designed to enable a new breed of enterprise software built around Java technology-based Web services, incorporating an SOA programming model and an open, extensible architecture. Elements of Project Kitty Hawk are currently scheduled to be phased into the Java Enterprise System and Java Studio Enterprise developer environment over the next two years, with initial deliveries targeted for the first half of 2005.

"Sun currently provides customers with one of the industry's best Java Web services products and technologies to develop and deploy secure, reliable and interoperable Web services," said Mark Bauhaus, vice president, Java Web Services at Sun. "Now, through Project Kitty Hawk, Sun will give flight to the industry's most practical service-oriented architecture tools and infrastructure products."

Project Kitty Hawk

Leveraging Project Kitty Hawk, Java Enterprise System is envisioned to greatly simplify the administration, management, security and provisioning of services by making it possible to expose core SOA capabilities as a collection of reusable services. For example, IT organizations building SOA applications will have the ability to use a Java Enterprise System-based registry service to provide centralized control of services versioning, services metadata management, and services registration and lookup, streamlining operations and enabling global services administration.

Using the shared services model and federation approach projected to be enabled by Project Kitty Hawk, IT organizations will be enabled to work with an enterprise-wide view of their services infrastructure. At the same time, Project Kitty Hawk will enable finer control in administering service-level agreements, security policies, and identity and user management across the organization.

Project Kitty Hawk will also feature next-generation business integration infrastructure, which Sun refers to as Java Business Integration. Sun and its partners plan to deliver this infrastructure, along with its partners, based on Java Business Integration standards. Java Business Integration, based on Java Specification Request (JSR) 208, is a Sun-led industry effort to extend the Java platform to provide new standardized integration capabilities built on a modern SOA architecture. Currently, there are 24 active members in the Expert Group for JSR-208 in addition to Sun, including BEA Systems, Collaxa, Oracle, SAP AG, SeeBeyond Technology Corp., Sonic Software, Sybase Inc., TIBCO Software and webMethods, Inc.

Implementations based on Java Business Integration will help to provide IT organizations with higher levels of portability and reuse of integration technologies not achievable with current integration products. Java Business Integration components such as business process engines, rules engines, and routing and transformation engines from multiple vendors can be easily combined in a single solution, reducing the cost of application integration and enabling best-of-breed solutions.

Additional capabilities planned for Project Kitty Hawk include Java Studio tools that enable Service Oriented Development of Applications (SODA) for deployment to the secure technologies in Project Kitty Hawk planned for the Java Enterprise System. These development environments include:

Findings - Sun Services will deliver to key customer stakeholders a formal SOA Readiness Assessment report, including both tactical and strategic recommendations for migration to an SOA.

Integrating SOAs with Existing Architectures

Today, Sun achieves interoperability with existing applications and services in part through product compliance with industry standards such as WS-I Basic Profile and SOAP. Additionally, customers can utilize adapters based on Web services and J2EE Connector Architecture standards to efficiently connect their enterprise applications and legacy systems. Through Sun's reseller agreement with iWay Software, also announced today, customers will be able to purchase iWay adapters for numerous third-party IT applications directly from Sun.

Published Jun. 28, 2004— Reads 7,513 — Feedback 1
Copyright © 2004 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

About SOA News Desk
SOA World Magazine News Desk trawls the world of distributed computing and SOA-related developments for the latest word on technologies, standards, products, and services and brings key information to you in a timely and convenient summary form.