Today's reading

Why Functional Programming Matters

The Functional Programming Language XSLT - A proof through examples

Developing JDBC Applications Test-first 

Just got out of a "lunch & learn" session with some reps from Sun. They basically discussed the Web Services Developer Pack. I asked if Sun had released interop results for the WSDP, the rep said he didn't know of any. Someone else asked if Sun was working on it, they didn't know. The tension over the Microsoft / Java gap was a little high, so I didn't say it at the time, but this doesn't give me a lot of confidence in using WSDP. Which is probably moot anyway, given the existing vendor relationships we have. The Sun guys were also talking about standardizing Web Service interfaces in JDK 1.4, presumably using the JCP. This seems far fetched to me; while the code they showed looked sort of similar to Apache SOAP, and they said that they're working off the Apache code base, what does this mean to vendors like Mind Electric? From the bit I've looked at GLUE, it seems like what they're doing is dramatically different. So is TME left out of the Java standardization picture? And will Apache be changing all their namespaces to javax.SOAP? Furthermore, is stardardization necessary? I understand that Sun's reps were in this specific instance responding to concerns we had over the .Net to J2EE shift, particularly with respect to the concerns over moving from a single vendor to an open vendor model, but it seems to me that the story of SOAP is interop, not APIs. That's what I get from reading Patrick Logan's essay. I don't think I'm too far out there on this.