I got sent a pointer to an InformationWeek article about Sun and Java. The best bit is page 2, where various people slag off (UK term==express some concerns), including Anne Thomas Manes, who says of JAX-RPC "It can't be fixed. It's just broken" . Anne, tell us what you really think!

And what comes up next, but a bit about Alpine:

At a July IEEE Conference in Orlando, Fla., the subject of Java's approach to Web services will come up again. "We claim that JAX-RPC ... is fundamentally flawed," say Steve Loughran and Edmund Smith, engineers at Hewlett-Packard's Bristol lab in the United Kingdom, in a paper submitted in advance of the conference: "Rethinking The Java Soap Stack."

Gosling dismisses the treatise: "People are free to do innovations on their own."

I wouldn't actually say that is a dismissal, more a non-committal observation. Just because JAXRPC sucks doesnt mean that people have to use it. But should Sun be building it in to Java6.0 when money would be better invested getting Swing to work properly on Linux?

Anyhow, I now have the honor of irritating James Gosling slightly, which makes up for the way the lack of unsigned datatypes and enums in Java has(had) long irritated me.