Seeking to advance its Web services strategy, IBM Tuesday launched the IBM WebSphere Software Developer Kit (SDK) for Web Services, intended to bring Windows and Linux developers into the Java-based Web services fold.

Big Blue also made a point of displaying its continued support of the open source movement by contributing two of its Web services technologies to the Apache Software Foundation.

Based on core Web services standards like XML (define), SOAP (define), UDDI (define) and WSDL (define), the new WebSphere SDK combines technology, tools and core runtime infrastructure which can be deployed on open Web services platforms. It includes a Java runtime environment based on WebSphere, the IBM Java SDK, an entry level data base, command line development tools and examples.

IBM said the SDK runs on both Linux and Windows operating systems, adding that future versions will support reference profiles and scenarios released by the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I).

"By taking advantage of the WebSphere SDK for Web Services, developers can easily generate functional Web services applications for use across heterogeneous computing environments, including WebSphere," said Scott Hebner, director of marketing for WebSphere software."

The newly donated open source code includes the Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF) and Web Services Inspection Language for Java (WSIL4J) specifications.

WSIF, currently used by the WebSphere infrastructure software and development tools, is a technology for invoking services described in WSDL across network protocols like SOAP, JMS and RMI . IBM said the specification is expandable, allowing it to support additional transport protocols like instant messaging, and noted that it supports multiple programming models.

WSIL4J will be incorporated in IBM's upcoming WebSphere Studio version 5. It allows application developers which use Java to access and process Web Services Inspection Language (WS-Inspection) -- jointly developed by IBM and Microsoft -- documents on a Web site.

The WebSphere SDK for Web Services is available for download via IBM developerWorks. Both WSIF and WSIL4J are available via the Apache Software license at the Apache Software Foundation.