Sun Announces Metro

Posted by Mark Little on Jun 20, 2007

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Sun Microsystems

With interest continuing to grow in Sun's Project Tango and JAX-WS support from other vendors also on the rise, Sun has decided to give a new name to the combination of the JAX-WS Reference Implementation and Project Tango: Project Metro. According to the Arun Gupta:

JAX-WS, the core platform, uses Tube as a basic processing unit that represents SOAP-level protocol handling code such as MustUnderstand and WS-Addressing processing. Multiple tubes are put together in a sequential fashion to complete the SOAP message handling. Project Tango uses this extensible architecture to implement they key WS-* specs, such as Reliable Messaging and Atomic Transactions, as Tubes as well.

Because underground railway systems, aka rapid transits, use tubes and are often referred to as metro's, you have the name! (Naming software projects is not easy, as this attempt shows!) But why a new project? Sun's Harold Carr believes there's been a lot of confusion around Project Tango and the JAX-WS RI:

... some people think that Tango is a different stack than our JAX-WS RI stack. But that is not the case. Tango is implemented on top of the JAX-WS RI. So, sometimes, to make this point in email messages, we've been saying "JAX-WS RI + Tango".

Plus the fact that Reference Implementation can be taken by some as meaning not a product, when in fact that is not the case. So Metro it is. Although at this point documentation, web sites etc. will continue to refer to the old names and the Metro binary is the Tango binary, including the JAX-WS RI.

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