* Sun unleashes plethora of tools to bring Web services to the enterprise
There were a lot of announcements coming out of last week’s JavaOne conference. The wrap-up press release was headlined: “SUN MICROSYSTEMS FUSES JAVA TECHNOLOGY AND WEB SERVICES: Announces Availability of J2EE 1.4 Beta2 SDK, WS-I Basic Profile Support, Web Services Developer Pack Version 1.2 and New Software for Secure Java Technology-Based Web Services; Major Open Source Donation of Web Services Technology to the java.net Initiative.” Two things not mentioned in that headline are the new Java games initiative (Sun named Chris Melissinos “chief gaming officer,” and created the Sun Game Technologies Group) and new releases of directory and identity servers.
Due out later this month is Version 5.2 of the Sun ONE Directory Server which will be followed in a few weeks by a new release (Version 6.1) of the Sun ONE Identity Server. Over the next couple of months there will also be new releases of Directory Proxy Server, Directory Server Resource Kit, and the Meta-Directory Server.
I caught up with Andy Eliopoulos, director of Sun ONE Network Identity, and John Barco, group manager, Sun ONE Directory, late last week so they could enthuse about the new releases.
The major new features of Directory Server, according to Barco, are a move to four-way multimaster replication (from two-way), the addition of a 64-bit address space (for greater scalability), an option to encrypt attributes (for better security), “fractional” replication (for faster replica updates as well as increased security) and the optional new Sun ONE Identity Synchronization for Windows 1.0.
“Fractional” replication is a process I’ve mentioned before as “filtered” replication (see “Another piece of the puzzle,” https://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/dir/2000/1009dir2.html) which means that not all objects and attributes need to be replicated – only those that satisfy the filters you set up. This keeps sensitive information away from more vulnerable servers (e.g., those not entirely under your control) while speeding the replication process since only the necessary data gets replicated. This is a “good thing,” a technology that any directory service which claims to be distributed and replicated needs to have.
ID Sync for Windows is a “hands off” tool – no agent needs to be installed on a Windows server – to synchronize data (users, passwords) between NT Domains, Windows 2000 Active Directory and Sun ONE Directory Server 5.2 (and only 5.2). Support for Windows 2003’s Active Directory may be available later this year.
A new version of Sun ONE Meta-Directory server will be based on this technology with connectors for most major directory, operating system and database systems and should release late this year.
This is all part of Sun’s push to become dominant in the Web services arena. As you and I both know, identity management is the key technology for making Web services successful. Directory Server 5.2 will support LDAP v3 and DSML v2 while the later release of Identity Server 6.1 will support the Liberty Alliance spec, SAML and the Web Services Security specification.
It does seem ironic that this directory system, the direct descendent of Netscape’s first Web directory created to foster e-commerce is now being re-tooled to support today’s e-commerce paradigm, a.k.a. “Web services”. Perhaps we could say that, “there’s nothing new under the Sun?” Okay, that was bad. Maybe “everything old is new again?” (Provided you can call less-than-10-year-old technology “old”).
Nevertheless, (and paradoxically) these are major steps toward making Sun’s directory and identity solutions enterprise packages rather than simply add-ons to Web servers. That’s the real good news.
Now, if only the chief gaming officer could see the benefit of directory-enabled games, then we’d really have something.
