Sun posts Java source code to developers
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Sun Microsystems has posted the next version of its Java 2 Platform Standard Edition (J2SE) to the developer community for early review and feedback.
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Sun Microsystems (Quote, Chart) may have saved itself from years of costly litigation when it settled with Microsoft over their long-running Java dispute, but a clause in the landmark deal has open source supporters parsing its potential impact.
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Sun is moving to a two-tier development environment in which corporate customers can get the commercial version of Solaris and developers can access the binary version.
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Coordinate, coordinate, coordinate Microsoft's security practices seem to be rubbing off on Sun Microsystems as the company is changing the way it updates and secures Java.â¦
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Migrate and be damned Sun Microsystems is reaching out to scripters and developers on rivals' IDEs with enterprise tools and a migration program for its latest version of NetBeans.â¦
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Do mobile application developers need to band together to tackle the tough issues facing them? Attendees at Sun's Java Mobile &amp; Embedded Developer Days Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Thursday afternoon will briefly discuss this issue.The idea is that developers must deal with issues such as fragmentation in features, behavior, security policies, and deployment policies and could form an alliance providing a single voice, said Terrence Barr, Sun technical evangelist for the mobile and embedded developer community."We call it the mobile developer alliance and it's essentially a developer activism group," Barr said on Wednesday evening. "It's just a grassroots thing. We haven't thought about it too much. The idea is to bring developers together to give them a common voice and try and work on some of the fragmentation and issues that the industry has."The mobile developer alliance is envisioned as an industrywide effort and not Java-specific. Developers, Barr said, have not had a consistent, uniform voice in facing issues.Among the problems developers face is having to slightly rework applications for each of the many phones, Barr said. Every phone, he said "has certain quirks that you have to deal with, and if you're trying to cover 80, 90 percent of the installed base out there it becomes very painful because you're literally producing hundreds of slightly different versions of the same application," he said.The alliance could serve as sort of a citizens' voice, but the exact mode of operation is still up for discussion, Barr said. Agreement on high-priority issues that developers want to make progress on would be a main focus, as well as trying to establish relationships with players such as carriers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs)."It's not necessarily [about] battling your enemies but it's about getting everybody on the same page," said Barr. No single player can address them, he said."At the end of the day, [developers] are the ones who have to make all this stuff work," he said.OEMs care about the platform and carriers care about the networks, said Barr. "The developer has to bring all these pieces together and that's why it's so painful," he said.Sun officials Wednesday also talked about Java ME (Micro Edition) development tools, including plans for a Java ME development toolkit with a consolidated environment for both the CDC (Connected Device Configuration) framework and CLDC (Connected Limited Device Configuration) technology.Also highlighted were enhancements planned for the Sun Java Wireless Toolkit for CDLC. Planned features include an application testing framework and support for Java Specification Request (JSR) 256 - Mobile Sensor API Submission to the JCP (Java Community Process) and JSR 280 - XML API for Java ME.The application testing framework is intended to automate manual testing. It will support refined testing scenarios in an emulated environment as well as improvements for testing of applications for users with visual, motor, or dexterity impairments.JSR 256 offers a unified way of managing sensors connected to mobile devices and easy access to sensor data. JSR 280 is designed to provide a general-purpose XML API for next-generation mobile devices.
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DÃ©jÃ  vu Sun has warned of a bug in its Java software platforms stemming from problems involving an update module designed to address the earlier start of Daylight Saving Time in the US this year.â¦
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InfoWorld - Sun&#160;is putting millions of Java users at risk by staggering the release of security patches for the software, security vendor eEye Digital Security said Monday.
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After being blasted by security researchers, Sun is changing the way it patches Java.
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(InfoWorld) - Sun continues to work on the Java Kernel, the idea of which is to provide a subset of the Java Runtime Environment tuned to particular programs. Formerly known as Java Browser Edition, the Java Kernel is planned for release as part of Java Standard Edition (SE) 6 update 4, probably in early-2008, a Sun representative said on Friday. Developers will have early access to the code to provide feedback. An original intent was to make Java like a Flash plug-in and enable a resurgence of Java on the browser. Applications would specify which features they need, such as Swing and XML parsing, said Sun staff engineer Ethan Nicholas, who is working on the project. "The basic idea was that the current Java Runtime Environment is simply too big, and most programs require only a small subset of the functionality," Nicholas wrote in September 2006 on his blog. "The 'browser edition' that I suggested would enable you to install exactly the subset of Java that your particular program required, but you would be able to download all of the other functionality on demand (and thus be fully compatible with J2SE)." Some Sun employees doubted the project would fly, according to Nicholas. Even a detailed analysis of the idea painted a bleak picture, he said. "The feature did in fact get submitted as a proposal for Java 7 under the name "Java Kernel" (the idea being that you download a small "kernel" of Java functionality, which is in turn capable of downloading the rest of it)," Nicholas said. Nicholas said he developed a stripped-down JRE installed containing only enough functionality to run "System.out.println," or "Hello World." To determine which files were necessary for the project, Nicholas wrote a program to iterate through the JRE files. "After going through all of the files in this fashion, I was left with an extremely minimal JRE that could run Hello World and ... well, that's about it. But it at least provided a starting point. Building a working installer from this JRE was itself a challenge because several of the files that weren't necessary to run Hello World were still necessary to successfully install the JRE, but I persevered and now have a fully functioning, minimal JRE," Nicholas said. Comments about the project posted on Nicholas's blog varied. "I also believe modularization of the JRE is the solution. Not just for the size of the download, but also for different other issues," one commenter said in 2006. "The problem here is that Java isn't just a browser based technology, it's a platform. When I write a Java applet or application, I expect the platform to be there," said another respondent.
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(InfoWorld) - Over two years in the making, Sun Microsystems is due to release the latest version of its Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) software Monday, placing particular emphasis on the application development platform's support for other scripting languages. Java SE 6 is the first version of the software where developers will be able to mix Java technology with other languages such as PHP, Python, Ruby and JavaScript. "Going multilingual is a big theme of this release," said Mark Reinhold, Sun's chief engineer for Java SE. Sun's approach used to be that Java was the solution for all developers' problems, he said. But it has since become clear to Sun that developers want to use other languages in conjunction with Java to create hybrid applications. Sun has created a collection of scripting engines on its Web site, and Java SE 6 includes a preconfigured version of Mozilla's open-source Rhino JavaScript engine. "Java SE 6 is an extremely significant release for us," said Jean Elliott, Sun's senior director of Java platform product marketing. She drew particular attention to community participation in the platform's development. For the first time, hundreds of non-Sun developers had some input into the Java SE development process, beginning in September 2004 as Sun released Java SE 5. One area where developers influenced the platform was their request that an add-on for Sun's NetBeans Java integrated development environment be included, Reinhold said. So the new platform features a new layout manager component based on NetBeans GUI Builder, formerly known as Matisse. Working more closely with external developers and enabling more than 160 third-party software vendors to test their Java-based applications on pre-release builds of Java SE 6 should result in more rapid adoption of the new software, Elliott said. "We expect the transition from Java SE 5 to 6 be very easy because of the focus we put on compatibility," she said. Michael Cote, a software analyst with RedMonk, thinks it could take developers up to a year or more to adopt Java SE 6. "Some teams will work it into their next release cycle, others will take several cycles to evaluate it, while others will have to wait on their applications server vendors to update to 6," he said via e-mail. Sun's done a lot of work around the Java HotSpot virtual machine and garbage collection to ensure that Java SE provides good "out-of-box performance," Reinhold said. The vendor has also spent time significantly improving tools within Java SE 6 aimed at diagnosing, managing and monitoring application development. Java SE 6 comes with support for Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system, the business release of which made its debut late last month. Sun had to engage in some "difficult workarounds" with pre-release versions of Vista, but Reinhold said that such issues are no longer a problem when integrating Java SE 6 with the APIs (application programming interfaces) contained in the final, shipping version of the Microsoft OS. Some of the joint engineering work Microsoft and Sun have done as part of interoperability effort Project Tango appears in Java SE 6's support for new Web services APIs such as the Java API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS) 2.0, he added. "There's a very clear message from Sun's customers: 'You need to work with Microsoft,'" Reinhold said. When the full-blown open-source version of Java SE known as OpenJDK Project appears in March next year, it will include all the new functionality of Java SE 6, according to Elliott.
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Vulnerabilities in the Sun Java Runtime Environment are described by one security expert as being "as bad as it gets."
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InfoWorld - Sun&#160;has ambitious plans for the commercial and open-source versions of its Solaris operating system, hoping to achieve for Solaris the kind of ubiquity already enjoyed by Java. To come close to reaching that goal, Sun needs to reach out more to developers and endeavor to overcome some long-held prejudices against the OS.
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Open-source software maker releases big update to Java-based application server program.
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Tiny, sensor-driven devices exposed A brainchild of Sun Microsystems' research wing, the Small Programmable Object Technology (Sun SPOT) platform code is now open to Java developers at large.â¦
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Ziff Davis - Sun Microsystems is rolling out its newest Java Enterprise System release, along with five market-driven subsets aimed at solving specific business problems.
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(InfoWorld) - SunÂ has ambitious plans for the commercial and open-source versions of its Solaris operating system, hoping to achieve for Solaris the kind of ubiquity already enjoyed by Java. To come close to reaching that goal, Sun needs to reach out more to developers and endeavor to overcome some long-held prejudices against the OS. Sun's Java programming language, which debuted in 1995, is present in most of today's PCs, mobile devices, and embedded systems. The vendor is now seeking that same kind of omnipresence for Solaris, its flavor of Unix. Sun intends to take the operating system into markets where it hasn't traditionally been a force, such as desktop and embedded systems, according to Marc Hamilton, vice president of Solaris marketing at Sun. The vendor is also keen toÂ position OpenSolaris as a real alternative to Linux. "There's an enormous momentum building behind Solaris," said Ian Murdock, chief operating platforms officer at Sun. He joined Sun in March after serving as the CTO of the Linux Foundation. Murdock's also the creator of the Debian Linux distribution and is keen to take the lessons he's learned in the Linux community and apply them to Solaris. Sun is preparing to release OpenSolaris binaries early next year in a distribution code-named "Project Indiana" that will be similar to Linux distributions. The work, which is getting under way in the OpenSolaris community, is aimed at creating a single CD installation of the basic OS and desktop environment, giving developers the option to install additional software from network repositories. Developers also will be able to create limited releases of the distribution targeted at attendees of a particular event. The whole idea behind Indiana is to build more of a developer community around Solaris, Murdock said. "How can we lower the barriers to programmers and run OpenSolaris as an ideal open-source operating system not originating from Sun?" he asked. Indiana will also enable faster release cycles with a new version appearing every six months. With Indiana in place, Sun will adopt a two-tier development model, Murdock said, establishing a clear path from Indiana and OpenSolaris -- for developers and early adopters -- to Solaris, which will be largely used by more conservative enterprise users. The challenge will be delivering what's effectively a single Solaris platform to two very different communities, he added. Sun has already managed various versions of Java, including mobile, standard, and enterprise editions of the software. But whereas with Java the challenge was getting developers interested in a new technology, with Solaris, Sun needs to appeal to people who may have had previous negative experiences with the OS. Founded in 2004, online messaging security provider DigiTar begun life as an all-Linux shop using Suse Linux, according to Jason Williams, CTO and COO of the Boise, Idaho, company. "We had a very anti-Sun bias," he said, dating back to the frustration he and a colleague experienced in college trying to use Solaris 8, which they quickly abandoned in favor of Suse. However, DigiTar ran into problems with the way Linux handled a storage subsystem in 2005. With OpenSolaris freely available, they tried out the OS and it worked well. "Solaris has resolved a lot of issues that Linux is just getting hit by," Williams said. Over time, DigiTar has made use of new Solaris features such as DTrace and ZFS (Zettabyte File System), which have helped the company quickly pin down the locations of performance bottlenecks and better optimize the system. "Our experience with Solaris has been very evolutionary," Williams said. "We came for one thing, then other benefits emerged." "We very much want to move to Indiana," Williams said, because it will fix two immediate issues DigiTar has with OpenSolaris: Ease of use and ease of installation. The company's keen to migrate all its software to Solaris, but compiling applications on Solaris has always been a little different from compiling on a GNU Linux distribution. Today, about 60 percent of its software runs on Gentoo Linux, versus 40 percent on OpenSolaris. Indiana will support GNU userland, the part of an application that requests system activities from the operating system kernel, making it easier to move Linux applications to Solaris. The other feature Indiana offers over previous versions of OpenSolaris is its packaging so it can be more easily installed. Williams is impressed by the community that's already grown up around OpenSolaris. "It's the most productive community I've ever been a part of," he said, with a posted query drawing 4 to 5 informed responses within an hour from both third parties and Sun engineers. Sun's approach to open source is "very mature and adult," Williams added, largely because Sun engineers are used to fielding customers' questions and know it's important to respond rapidly. In order to win other converts, Williams recommends that Sun go back to school. "The key thing they need to do is get back into the colleges," he said. "That's where we formed our opinion of Sun." Making Solaris easy to use and highlighting useful tools such as DTrace could go a long way toward wooing developers, Williams added. Sun is encouraging more use of OpenSolaris in universities with plans to add 500 more Campus Ambassadors around the world to the several hundred that were already in academia, Hamilton said. The Ambassadors are students who receive free training and support from Sun and then establish open-source developer communities in their colleges and evangelize OpenSolaris and Java to their peers and teachers. Williams also recommends letting Indiana "splinter" so that developers can freely create their own distributions and further spread the Solaris technology. Sun hopes that if it establishes Indiana as a reference platform for OpenSolaris, people are less likely to seek out or develop other distributions, Hamilton said. "With Linux, what happened was there was a void and people filled it," Murdock said, referring to the large number of Linux distributions in the market. "Everything we do here is to allow for flexibility, so there is the possibility of multiple distributions." Going after developers is only one of several strategies Sun is pursuing to raise the profile of Solaris. The vendor's also keen to increase the number of hardware platforms on which the OS is available on. Earlier this month, in a deal that would have been unthinkable a few years back,Â IBM, one of Sun's main hardware rivals, agreed to redistribute Solaris OS and Solaris Subscriptions for some of its System x and BladeCenter servers. From IBM's perspective, the move is in line with its pledge to offer users a range of operating systems and also will enable the vendor to make money on support calls involving Solaris running on IBM hardware. Hamilton said Sun's in discussions with about 40 original equipment manufacturers to make the OS available on their hardware. The companies include smaller hardware vendors that operate in particular geographies, but he's also interested in having IBM-like relationships with HP and Dell.