But take a closer look at the recent announcement and you'll find that Sun's embrace of open source is as warm as the air kisses exchanged by Hollywood starlets.

Rather than jump into bed with the open-source community, Sun is keeping one foot firmly on the ground. It refuses to accept any API issued under what it considers "viral" licensing -- the General Public License in particular -- and will continue to maintain complete control over the Java language specification.

Easing the Pain: Migration Tools and Strategies Start using Java Server Pages, Java Platform 2 Enterprise Edition and other technologies already employed with Notes. Experiment by moving certain apps to DB2. Domino interacts with back-end systems such as -- you guessed it -- DB2. Use the available tools, such as Lotus Web Services Enablement Kit (for WebSphere) and Domino Enterprise Integration Tools (for DB2), that let you run LotusScript within IBM's WebSphere. You may not have to rewrite all that code -- just some of it.

What does Sun hope to gain from the open-source community? For starters, the company could bolster its recently unveiled XML-aware version of Java designed to plug into J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition), providing Web services support for mobile devices. This API, in conjunction with Sun's initiative to speed the performance of Java by a factor of 10, is aimed directly at its main Web services competitor, Microsoft .Net.

The fight for the mobile platform is an important one and, by extension, so is the battle for Web services domination. By their very nature, Web services are designed to be interoperable regardless of development and deployment platform, but the security mechanisms behind the services are not. Microsoft's authentication and commerce framework, .Net Passport, will not be compatible with the solution provided by the Sun-led Liberty Alliance Project. And mobile devices, unlike PCs, will not accommodate dual-booting operating systems any time soon.

The choices made for providing Web services on mobile devices will dictate which security mechanism will be used -- and if it's used on most mobile devices, it's likely to be the choice on other platforms. Java already has a slight lead in today's mobile market, and it should be able to extend that lead in the coming years.

Sun's tepid embrace of the open-source community is designed to encourage development of Java-based solutions for Web services. Although the vendor's gesture is only half-hearted, the results are likely to be myriad applications and APIs for Java-based services, offering you a larger knowledge base with which to build your applications or from which to find experienced developers.

If you're planning on providing Web services for any platform -- mobile or not -- you'll need to choose your vendor partner wisely. It isn't just a platform choice anymore; it's a strategic business decision that will determine the future of your application development.
--Lori MacVittie, lmacvittie@nwc.com.