Sun Microsystems is taking the term “open” to new levels with the
addition of numerous open source technologies along with its own. The company will make a series of announcements at its JavaOne conference in San Francisco this week that show Java, at age 13, is learning to play well with others.
Sun’s (NASDAQ: JAVA) move to open source has been somewhat slow but
steady. The reason, the company has always maintained, is because it has to
vet all of the code to make sure that it is all Sun code, not licensed, and
is theirs to release in the first place.
With today’s announcement of the NetBeans 6.1 IDE
availability of OpenSolaris, more than just Sun’s own open source code is
part of the mix. Dynamic languages like Ruby and PHP are also getting an
embrace.
“It’s interesting that they are going outside the walls of Sun to work
with other open source people, which is a really big shift in Sun’s open
source strategy,” Michael Cote, an analyst with Redmonk told
InternetNews.com. “Usually a commercial company doing open source
supports only their own thing. There’s not a case of ‘here’s a bunch of
things we gathered together,’ and Sun hasn’t been known for doing that sort
of thing. So it seems like a pretty big strategic move for them.”
Sun made a bold move in buying
MySQL earlier this year, but with money tight from one tough quarter and
another looming, Cote figures Sun won’t be breaking the bank for more big purchases any time soon.
Charlie Boyle, director of Solaris marketing for Sun, acknowledged that
the company is looking beyond its doors for a best-of-breed solution.
“OpenSolaris from its core has been about combining our great innovations
developed in open source with other open source projects,” he said.
“It was the project’s decision to integrate. We can’t develop everything
ourselves so we need to work with other companies to say what’s the best and
build new on top of that,” Boyle added.
Sun today introduced OpenSolaris 2008.05, the first version to include
some of the technologies in Ian Murdock’s Project
Indiana. Murdock, developer of the Debian Linux distribution, joined the
company last year to bring a more modern method of updating and modifying a
Solaris installation. The project was inspired by RPM and Yum, which are used to update Linux installations, but will offer more versatility, such as the ability to roll back an update.
OpenSolaris 2008.05 also features application migration support for the
first time, so if a developer is using it as their development and test bed
and wants to move an application to a Solaris environment and it fails, Sun
will help with the migration.
The other product release is the NetBeans Integrated Development
Environment (IDE) 6.1 and an early access version (read: beta) of PHP
scripting language support for NetBeans. In addition to PHP, NetBeans is
updating its support for JavaScript and Ruby. Among the new features in
NetBeans 6.1 is new functionality for Ajax development and tighter
integration with the MySQL database.
Sun has added the ability for JavaScript to call Ruby on Rails and PHP
applications from JavaScript code. Many of the old incompatibilities in
JavaScript code have been ironed out, making cross-platform development much
easier, according to David Folk, group manager for NetBeans marketing at
Sun.
“JavaScript is instrumental to compliment a lot of Web application
development,” he said. “So we enable people to have good support for
JavaScript no matter what they are trying to do.”
The JavaScript support includes semantic highlighting, code completion,
type analysis, quick fixes, semantic checks and refactoring. Also, NetBeans
6.1 adds in a browser compatibility feature to make it easier to write
JavaScript code that is compatible with Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari or
Windows Internet Explorer.
Support for Amazon’s ‘Compute Cloud’
In addition to OpenSolaris for use on your own computers, Sun and Amazon
(NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced the beta availability of Sun’s OpenSolaris OS
on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
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Now OpenSolaris users can rent space and CPU cycles on Amazon EC2, be it for testing applications or to augment their existing enterprise. Amazon EC2 is an on-demand cloud computing service
which enables users to buy only the capacity they need and scale with their
changing business requirements.
Up to now, rented space was only available on a few Linux service
providers, according to Juan-Carlos Soto, vice president of global market
development and engineering at Sun. Sun will support development projects on
EC2 that customers would like to eventually deploy on their own systems.
“What we’re trying to do is make sure whatever environment is appropriate
for that customer is available for them, so they can seamlessly move when
they need it,” said Soto.
Cote said there’s a certain “hipness” to using Amazon EC2 because it’s so
popular, but he said it’s also a great way to try out OpenSolaris without
any real investment beyond computer time.
“Just having it available on Amazon lowers the barriers to those who want to test it out,” he said.
“There are a lot of features in OpenSolaris that people want to test out.”
