Sun Microsystems have released Milestone 4 of WSIT. One of the new features in there is support for WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-Coordination. According to the announcement they've also shown interoperability with .NET 3.0. As Ryan Shoemaker says:
It's interesting that with the exception of WS-CAF and it's associated WS-TransactionManagement, Sun were not very active in the OASIS WS-TX technical committee. That group held several interoperability events over the years, based on complex interoperability scenarios developed within the group. IBM, IONA Technologies, JBoss/Red Hat and Microsoft participated, but Sun was notable by their absence (as was BEA, one of the original specification authors). Oracle are the other traditional transaction vendor who has remained silent (since WS-CAF).
It will be interesting to see if Sun moves to support WS-BusinessActivity, or remains with WS-AtomicTransaction. It's true that if you have JTA then doing WS-AtomicTransaction should be straightforward, but WS-BusinessActivity addresses a whole different range of use cases that are quite important in long running, loosely coupled interactions.
Supporting these standards in our web services stack allows you to write fault tolerant applications that bridge across heterogeneous systems. Java EE developers can easily write applications that take advantage of distributed transactions that span multiple Java EE application servers (without needing WSIT). What WSIT adds is the ability to include transacted web service methods (think "container managed transactions for servlets") and also bridge across heterogeneous systems (think "Microsoft"). In a homogeneous GlassFish system, distributed transactions flow across RMI/IIOP. In a heterogenous web service environment, the transactions use the WS-Coordination and WS-AtomicTransaction protocols to flow transactional context and execute the two-phase commit protocol.There's a screencast available too that shows the system in action.
It's interesting that with the exception of WS-CAF and it's associated WS-TransactionManagement, Sun were not very active in the OASIS WS-TX technical committee. That group held several interoperability events over the years, based on complex interoperability scenarios developed within the group. IBM, IONA Technologies, JBoss/Red Hat and Microsoft participated, but Sun was notable by their absence (as was BEA, one of the original specification authors). Oracle are the other traditional transaction vendor who has remained silent (since WS-CAF).
It will be interesting to see if Sun moves to support WS-BusinessActivity, or remains with WS-AtomicTransaction. It's true that if you have JTA then doing WS-AtomicTransaction should be straightforward, but WS-BusinessActivity addresses a whole different range of use cases that are quite important in long running, loosely coupled interactions.