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.
