"Interoperability and being able to use standards is key to being able to build and run smoothly your business applications across your heterogeneous systems within an enterprise SOA," Kazi said.

Despite hoopla about Web scripting languages such as AJAX and PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) taking the spotlight from Java recently, Sun maintains that Java still is critical.

"Software just continues to evolve, so the Web tier is always going to be sort of at the front," said Jeff Jackson, senior vice president of Java Development and Platform Engineering at Sun. Java, he said, is not getting old; the planned Mustang release of Java features plug-ins for all scripting languages.

JavaScript is an old technology that has been revitalized to solve business problems, Jackson said. "The nice part is, it coexists with Java just fine," said Jackson.

Asked about the possibility of open sourcing Java, Jackson said Sun continues to look at which technologies to open-source. "Sun is very open source-oriented," he said. More open source announcements are expected, with Sun already having provided its Java Enterprise System server middleware stack via open source, Jackson said.