Sun Microsystems PRESTO Prototype
The goal of the PRESTO protocol is to define a profile (a la WS-I) for a transport protocol
based on Web Services for better and more standard interop between
ministries and related organisations. The prototype developed for the French government (DGME) and presented
during the PRESTO meeting on October 13th 2006 in Paris was developed
by Sun Microsystems using Java and GlassFish.
This participation in the natural consequence of previous Sun
Microsystems innovations (Java, Liberty Alliance, OpenDocument) and
participation in major French public sector projects. The
PRESTO prototype demonstrated was built upon these major
principles :
- Java and Java EE 5
- Full Open Source
- Integrated Tooling
- OpenOffice integration
- Complete suite of supported products
The Java technology provides portability across diverse operating systems such as Solaris, Linux, Windows, Mac
and other Unix systems. It has a well deserved security reputation and its 5 million developers make it an ideal starting point for developers willing to use this implementation of the PRESTO protocol..
GlassFish is a new generation Java EE application server, the reference implementation for Java EE 5 and it entirely Open Source.
This product alone covers all the PRESTO requirements and no further
assembly or integration is required. GlassFish is
enterprise-ready, provides excellent performance
and a great documentation. It is also the result of collaborating
companies such as Oracle, BEA, Tmax, JBoss, Jetty with the rest of
the GlassFish community.
The technical GlassFish subset used for the Web Services communication is 
WSIT
(Web
Services Interoperability Technology). WSIT's interoperability level is
regularly being tested against other industry implementations such
as Microsoft's .Net 3.0 (WCF). On the development side, Java EE 5
brings much greater ease of development for enterprise applications
with technologies such as EJB 3.0 and JAX-WS 2.x
which hide the infrastructure complexity to the developer using
a POJO (Plain Old Java Object) approach. The number of lines of
code needed to implement to PRESTO prototype is significantly less than
using technologies such as JAX-RPC which forces the developer to deal
with data binding and other technical message-level details.
NetBeans
is the Open Source tool used for the PRESTO prototype to accelerate the
development of the code. Its ability to generate an implementation from
the PRESTO web services contract expressed in WSDL lets the developer
focus on the business logic. Calling an existing PRESTO web service is
also trivial (whether from a servlet,
an EJB, a JSP page or a rich Swing client application), it's just
a matter of drag-n-drop. NetBeans allows the user to express le quality
of a PRESTO service: optimized, reliable, and/or secure. Such
configuration is stored in XML Policies which are kept separate from
the application logic.
In
order to better illustrate what the use of the PRESTO protocol
could be for an end user, the Sun Microsystems prototype includes an
extension written for the OpenOffice/StarOffice
productivity suites. This extension module is written
in Java/Swing and allows the user to send the current office
document using the PRESTO protocol, whether it is a spreadsheet, a text
document or a presentation. In the case of an Open Document format, the document is sent together with its meta-data (title, author, comments, creation date, etc...).
The support product implementing PRESTO is Sun Application Server 9.1. The Sun Java CAPS(Composite
Application Platform Suite) offering is the natural SOA complement to
the PRESTO protocol allowing users to deal with integration
(connectors), business processes (BPEL workflow), BAM (Business or
technical Activity Monitoring) and providing a portal for a secure
access to services. All of this is provided with the appropriate
NetBeans tooling of course.