BEA and Oracle incorporate Sun's Project Tango

Posted by Mark Little on Jun 07, 2007

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In a recent article, Sun's director for SOA products, Kevin Schmidt mentioned the fact that both Oracle and BEA have incorporated Sun's Web Services stack, Project Tango. As he says:

It's been incorporated by BEA and Oracle. They're not going off and doing their own things.

Whether this is instead of their own offerings, or as well as, is not know at present. However, either way it is still an interesting development. Kevin goes on to discuss the fact that Tango is being developed in open source and how Sun are keen to work with others in the community.

We would love to collaborate or contribute with others in doing that. The work that we've done as part of Project Tango was done in open source. It's part of GlassFish. It's out there. Others are taking it and incorporating it in their products. So we have the beginnings of that kind of collaboration.

But there are a number of other open source Web Services stacks out there, including Apache Axis, JBossWS and XFire. If larger commercial vendors decide to go down the open source route rather than developing their own, that could leave only Microsoft with their own stack. With open source Web Services stacks improving in capabilities and performance all of the time, it makes sense for some vendors to concentrate their development efforts elsewhere. After all, commoditization of the infrastructure is something open source does well. But does that make Tango a force to be reckoned with? As Kevin points out:

It would be a significant enabler of interoperability across the Web services platforms. That's certainly the reason we worked with Microsoft.

Interoperability is certainly an area where Tango has concentrated but some of the other stacks have too and often in more formal settings. Furthermore, the specifications that Tango supports are sometimes not the ones that are or are becoming, the standards. However, many users and analysts have taken note of Tango's emphasis on interoperability with Microsoft and that is important. Whether or not it is enough to keep Tango in the running with other open source efforts remains to be seen. However, at the moment it seems that of all Sun's projects, this one at least has caught a significant portion of the mindshare.

1. Back to top

   Spring WebServices ?

   by anjan bacchu

   Hi There,
   
   How about spring web services>/a> ?
   
   Thank you,
   
   BR,
   ~A

   Reply

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   Tango does implement W3C and Oasis Specifications

   by Harold Carr

   Your article says that Project Tango sometimes does not support specs that are becoming standards. That is not accurate. Project Tango implements both standard and spec submissions (still needing finalization). See the page Project Tango Specs. These are the same specifications implemented by .NET 3.0 as shipped in Vista.

   Reply

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   Re: Tango does implement W3C and Oasis Specifications

   by Mark Little

   Harold, the statement in the article is correct. If you follow the link you'll see that it refers to WS-Transaction, which Tango supports but the version is not what has become the standard. If you see, I had a conversation with Ryan Shoemaker where he said that Tango supports the 2004 version of WS-C/WS-AT. Although several other vendors do as well, the major players in that space already support WS-TX 1.0 and often 1.1 as well. I could be wrong, but by implication Tango also doesn't support the 2006 version of WS-A either, since the 2004 version of WS-Transaction is dependent on the 2004 version of WS-A. I'd certainly be interested in knowing if that assumption was wrong.

   Reply

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   Re: Tango does implement W3C and Oasis Specifications

   by Harold Carr

   Hello Mark. The main goal of Tango is MS .NET 3.0 interop. So Tango implements the same set of specifications as .NET 3.0 in Vista. I imagine that future versions of .NET will update to standard specifications (instead of the submission versions that were available when .NET FCSed). We will likewise do updates. My main point is, the article implies Tango is misaligned on specifications, but, as I pointed out, we are perfectly aligned with our target: .NET 3.0

   Reply

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   Re: Tango does implement W3C and Oasis Specifications

   by Arun Gupta

   Mark, To add to Harold's comment - Tango does support both Member Submission and W3C Core and SOAP WS-Addressing. The WSDL Binding spec is no longer valid and Metadata will be supported when it goes final.

   Reply

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   Re: Tango does implement W3C and Oasis Specifications

   by Mark Little

   Thanks Harold and Arun for the update. For my own edification, does Tango's support of W3C WS-A run in parallel to the 2004 version that is needed by WS-Transaction?

   Reply

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   how many *advanced* webservice stacks are there really?

   by Gerald Loeffler

   hi,
   
   the article seems to imply that webservice stacks are becoming a commodity. however, to me it seems that this is far from the truth (yet). basic SOAP/WSDL support is really not the issue - but the (IMHO) desparately needed industrial-grade support of WSDL 2.0, WS-A, WS-RM, WS-Security and other WS-* specs that "just works" is almost ridiculously elusive in Java-land.
   
   also, in contrast to what the article seems to suggest, it is my impression that project Tango (WSIT) is really one of very few implementations of these "advanced" WS-* specs that is at least on track to deliver.
   
   i'd be very interested to be corrected on this - but my perception of the current state of "advanced" webservice stacks is roughly as follows:
   - AXIS1: widely deployed but only basic WS-* support and in maintenance mode as focus has shifted to AXIS2
   - AXIS2: addresses all important WS-* specs and well underway to implement them; not too much uptage in many tools yet (such as ESBs (apart from Synapse))
   - WSIT/Tango: ditto
   - XFire: widely deployed but only basic WS-* support and essentially superceded by Apache CXF
   - Apache CXF: under heavy development but major "advanced" WS-* specs seem to be supported today
   - JBossWS: no support for "advanced" WS-* specs that i can see
   
   so much for commoditisation - i would be a happier person if i could (today) pick any mature, reliable webservice stack that implements advanced WS-* specs and interoperates flawlessly with at least .Net...
   
   (and, while we are at it, where is the standardisation of the APIs beyond JAX-WS 2.0 and basic SOAP/WSDL??)
   
   sorry for the negative vibrations ;-)
   gerald
   
   www.gerald-loeffler.net

   Reply

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   Re: how many *advanced* webservice stacks are there really?

   by Mark Little

   Web Services stacks (or more correctly SOAP stacks) are becoming a commodity. Axis1 did that very well. Back in the early days of Web Services, everyone had their own stack implementation. That's no longer the case. If the original article is correct and BEA and Oracle have adopted Tango, then this is a significant step towards commoditization, at least as far as Tango is concerned.
   
   But you're right, there is a difference between the basic support for Web Services (all you need there is a good standards compliant SOAP stack) and the more advanced capabilities. The former is pretty easy to achieve, whereas the latter requires a lot of time and effort (not least of which is participating in all of the standards interoperability workshops).
   
   As for standardising the APIs, well for Java you have to look at the JCP for that. It's often a slow process unfortunately.

   Reply

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   Re: Tango does implement W3C and Oasis Specifications

   by Arun Gupta

   Yes, both versions are supported parallely.

   Reply

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    Re: how many *advanced* webservice stacks are there really?

    by Arun Gupta

    I'd like to post a correction to the article.
    
    BEA WebLogic 10 is using only JAX-WS and Oracle is not using any part of either JAX-WS/Tango. BTW, the new aggregated stack is called Metro (blogs.sun.com/arungupta/entry/announcing_metro_...).

    Reply

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    Re: how many *advanced* webservice stacks are there really?

    by Arun Gupta

    Just to add though Metro is now supported in JBoss as well. And we certainly hope BEA and Oracle picks up Metro :)

    Reply

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