The Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) announced the availability of its Release 5.1 Java Mapping specification. This enhanced specification provides a mapping of the Application Interface Specification (AIS) services to the Java language as well as an accompanying whitepaper that details how SA Forum services can be integrated with application programming interfaces (APIs) standardized by the Java community. Java applications will be able to leverage these services to support High Availability (HA) for all applications, including Operation Administration and Maintenance (OAM) applications.

“For the first time, the Java community can take advantage of the SA Forum’s Application Interface Specification and ease the integration between AIS high availability middleware and the Java world,” said Ulrich Kleber, SA Forum Technical Work Group Chair. “The newly defined Java APIs for existing SA Forum services finally provide a standardized Java API to go along with our C-API. Java is a popular platform, and we’re pleased that this first release of the Java APIs will extend the usage of AIS to this broader community.”

The enhanced specification release defines a Java language binding that provides access to high availability middleware implementations compliant with the SA Forum’s AIS. The AIS standardizes the interface between SA Forum-compliant HA middleware and service applications.

The Java APIs can be used to integrate AIS with complex Java platforms, such as Java Enterprise Edition. They can also be used directly by Java applications. The Java APIs supported in the release include the Availability Management Framework (AMF), the Cluster Membership Service (CLM) and the Notification Service (NTF). The Java AMF API provides explicit HA functionalities that do not currently exist for Java platforms. These Java platforms will now be able to utilize the AMF API to provide HA to their applications.

Additionally, the SA Forum has released a new whitepaper entitled “Java usage of SA Forum Notification Services.” The whitepaper describes how Java can be integrated with the SA Forum notification service and enable Java applications to send alarms using the Java Management Extension (JMX) API, a standardized API widely used within the Java community.

The SA Forum plans to address additional APIs for Java in future spec releases. The Java APIs will follow the same backward compatibility guideline used for the existing SA Forum services.

Download Release 5.1 free at http://www.saforum.org/specification/download/.