Major companies usually dominate the annual JavaOne Developers Conference, but small vendors are also unveiling new technology. Two of those vendors attending the San Francisco conference next week are Systinet and Gemstone Systems.

Two-year-old Systinet, in Cambridge, Mass., will demonstrate a new security product called WASP Security Identity, an acronym for the company's Web Application and Service Platform, which includes tools and an application server for building and deploying Web services. The platform includes a UDDI register for publishing Web services, and its tools can plug into Java integrated-development environments, such as Borland JBuilder, to add Web-services support to Java applications.

WASP Security Identity is a single-sign on service that's exposed as a Web service, letting it be plugged into environments supporting the emerging specifications for tying business applications. The new product implements Security Assertions Markup Language, a standard developed by Oasis, to encode authentication and authorization information into data moving between applications over HTTP. Web-services technology, as well as SAML, is based on XML. WASP Security Identity supports LDAP directories, which is used to store identification and authorization information on network users.

Security standards for Web services are still under development within standards bodies, so products like Systinet's are important for companies that are earlier adopters of the technology, Forrester Research analyst Frank Gillett says. "What they're doing is interesting, but the real wow for security in Web services will come with the standards, because then you'll be able to do security across heterogeneous environments," he says.

WASP Security Identity is scheduled to ship in April, but pricing hasn't been released. Systinet, whose development team is in Prague, Czech Republic, raised $21 million in its second round of funding last month, led by Warburg Pincus.

Gemstone, based in Beaverton, Ore., will demonstrate a new performance tool called GemFire at the show. The shared-memory system lets large-scale Java applications share objects in RAM, significantly increasing performance and scalability. The tool expresses the shared-memory capabilities in terms familiar to the Java programmer, lowering the learning curve. A C interface makes it possible to share C data structures as well as Java objects, bringing similar performance enhancements to older applications written in C or C++. GemFire will ship in the summer; pricing hasn't been released.