Geared for SOA deployments, the WS02 Tungsten application server supports core WS-* (pronounced "ws star") specifications for Web services as well as REST (Representational State Transfer). Tungsten is built on the Apache Axis2 Web services foundation, which WSO2 helped develop.

"Basically, our focus is building an application server that lets you host business logic and the way that you expose business logic to the world is through Web services and XML interfaces," said Sanjiva Weerawarana, chairman and CEO of WSO2. While at IBM, Weerawarana led that company's WS-* initiatives and also co-authored Web services technologies such as WSDL, BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services), and Apache SOAP.

"There's a significant disconnect between what the J2EE stack wants and what the Web services stack wants," Weerawarana said.

A J2EE stack features technologies such as JAX (Java API for XML) and JMS (Java Message Service). "It's a completed, powerful stack, but when you're doing Web services, that stack is not in sync with what the Web services technologies need," Weerawarana said.

Ironically, the initial version of Tungsten, available now, is for Java programmers. Releases planned for C and PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor language developers are due in August. Tungsten features an AJAX-based (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) administrative console that uses RSS to send alerts.