What is the functional equivalent of Windows Communication Foundation in Java 6?

Question

What is the functional equivalent of Windows Communication Foundation in Java 6?

Answer 1

WCF offers several communication options. A nice presentation is this white paper by David Chappel. There the following options are described:

• Interoperable Communication using SOAP and WS-*
• Binary Communication Between WCF Applications
• RESTful Communication
• Communication using POX, RSS, and ATOM
• Communication with Line-of-Business Applications using Adapters
• Communication via Message Queues
• Communication via Windows Peer-to-Peer Networking
• Communication Between Processes on the Same Machine
• Custom Communication

Although some options are not relevant to Java (e.g. the second one), it may help you to identify the corresponding functional equivalents in Java.

Answer 2

I don't know what all WCF contains, but JAX-WS (and its reference implementation Metro) might be a good starting point.

Some of the other technologies in J2EE may apply as well.