Several partners—as well as competitors—joined Sun at the San Francisco event to announce compatibility with J2EE 1.4 or plans to support the specification, which became available last November.

Five companies now offer J2EE-compatible products, Sun said. Those companies are Sun, of Santa Clara, Calif.; IBM Corp., of Armonk, N.Y.; Oracle Corp., of Redwood Shores, Calif.; Tmax Soft Inc., of Englewood Cliffs, N.J.; and Trifork A/S, of Aarhus, Denmark.

Resource Library:

J2EE 1.4 is the Web services release of the J2EE specification in that it is the first version of J2EE to focus on promoting Web services through the convergence of Java, XML and Web services technology.

Dennis MacNeil, senior product manager of Java Web services at Sun, said the focus with J2EE 1.4 "is not only on application servers but the entire Java ecosystem. A number of players are here, not just in the application-server space."

In addition to IBM's and Oracle's presence, the Sun-sponsored event included panels with officials from Borland Software Corp., BEA Systems Inc., SAP AG and others. And other companies, such as Attachmate Corp. and iWay Software, were on hand at the event to demonstrate complementary technologies.

MacNeil said the difference between moving to J2EE 1.3 and transitioning to J2EE 1.4 is that there are more lower-cost and open-source application-server alternatives this time around. "There is a great deal of choice," he said. "The vendors who were leaders with J2EE 1.3 may not necessarily be leaders with J2EE 1.4."

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