Sun talks up Java advances
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SANTA CLARA, CALIF. -- Simplifying Java programming is on the minds of Java development executives at Sun, but making the language available via an open source format remains off the table, according to executives at a Sun âChalk Talkâ session here on Wednesday.
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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) - Sun Microsystems has added Ruby support to the NetBeans IDE and bolstered the JRuby platform as well, company officials acknowledged on Thursday. The early-access release of the NetBeans Ruby Pack is comprised of a plug-in to the open-source NetBeans development environment supporting Ruby and JRuby, which is a Java implementation of Ruby that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. NetBeans has been centered on Java but is being extended to Ruby. Ruby developers typically have not been using IDEs, Sun officials said. But Sun's announcement "really gives you a much more productive environment than you've had for Ruby before," said Tor Norbye, a Sun senior staff engineer. Sun has taken notice of the popularity of Ruby. "It's offered a new way of looking at development: more agile, more fun in a lot of ways," said Charles Nutter, also a senior staff engineer at Sun. He and Thomas Enebo are the core developers of JRuby; both began working at Sun in September. By accommodating Ruby, Sun is branching out from its Java mindset, said James Governor, principal analyst at RedMonk. "If you just look at this overall, there are some sacred cows being slaughtered here," Governor said. "There is a real change in Sun's thinking, and it really does [appear] that the Java permafrost is beginning to thaw," with Sun supporting scripting languages like Ruby, he said. "Ruby is the hottest scripting language out there right now," said Governor, who added he expects Sun to make a similar move to support another popular scripting language, PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). The NetBeans Ruby Pack enables features like code completion. Integration documentation pop-ups are offered for Ruby API calls. Also included is semantic analysis with highlighting of parameters and unused local variables. "The key thing is Ruby developers have not been used to getting a lot of the features you've had in the Java world," such as code completion, said Norbye. NetBeans Ruby capabilities extend to the Ruby on Rails Web framework as well. "This helps you write Ruby on Rails apps faster," Norbye said. Ruby support is available for NetBeans 6 Milestone 7 as a download. The upcoming NetBeans 6.0 platform, due in November, will be bundled with Ruby support. To access the Ruby technology, NetBeans users can click here and then choose the Q-Build option under Build Type. Meanwhile, Sun is formally announcing the 0.9.8 release of JRuby, with enhanced support for Ruby on Rails on Monday. Compatibility issues have been addressed, according to Sun.
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Sun Microsystems Inc. Thursday announced the availability of the J2SE (Java 2 Platform Standard Edition) 5.0, which the company said looks to be the most significant Java upgrade to date.
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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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InfoWorld - Sun Microsystems on Tuesday unveiled Version 7 of the company&#8217;s enterprise development tool suite, Sun Java Studio Enterprise, and previewed a JVM that will support 64-bit AMD Opteron processors.
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Apparently it&#39;s not enough that Sun peppers any and all discussions of its hardware and software products with liberal mentions of its Java programming language, now the vendor wants Wall Street to sit up and take more note of its homegrown technology too.
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Sun described on Wednesday a growth strategy that depends in large part on giving away software in the hope that customers will like it enough to sign up for support contracts and perhaps buy Sun hardware on which to run it.It&#39;s a strategy Sun started several years ago with a free version of its application server and that it has accelerated with such products&#160;as StarOffice, OpenSolaris, its Open xVM virtualization software, and, most recently,&#160;its acquisition of the open-source database vendor MySQL.The free software allows Sun to build communities of developers who will do pilot projects with its software and may eventually buy licenses for commercial deployment, or buy professional services to support critical applications, CEO and President Jonathan Schwartz said at the company&#39;s press day Wednesday. He called Sun&#39;s software a &quot;media asset&quot; for building communities.&quot;These are no longer simply software products, these are media properties -- networks around which communities are being built, [and] this is a means for Sun to talk to a very large developer community,&quot; he said.He put up a slide that showed a map of the world covered in pink dots. Each dot represented a download of Solaris, he said, and hence an opportunity for Sun to start a dialogue with IT people that could lead to a sale of its services and hardware.&quot;Not all customers will pay for these products before they use them -- very few will, actually,&quot; he admitted. But they all buy servers and storage on which to run the software, and the download gives Sun a foot in the door to try to capture that sale.&quot;The reason MySQL was interesting to us is it puts 50,000 new dots on that map every day, and from the community, market opportunities will emerge,&quot; Schwartz said.Sun&#39;s growth is important to customers. Its revenue funds its research and development efforts, and customers want to know there is a big community of specialists in Sun products to support their businesses.Analysts are divided about the strategy. At Sun&#39;s financial analyst conference last week, Sanford Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi said he found it hard to see a link between software downloads and Sun&#39;s revenue growth.&quot;If you were to plot a chart showing revenue growth over the last 12 quarters and Solaris downloads, there would really be no correlation at all,&quot; Sacconaghi said.&quot;Oh, I think there would be an exceptional correlation,&quot; Schwartz replied. &quot;If you had shut those downloads off three years ago, our revenue would have been declining double-digit.&quot;He reiterated the point Wednesday. Sun&#39;s strongest growth period came in the late 1990s and was preceded by wide use of its software in universities, he said. Today, the growth of Sun&#39;s Niagara servers has been driven by making Solaris open source, Schwartz said.Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff said there probably is a connection between Sun&#39;s free and open-source software strategy and its revenue growth, but even if there is not, the strategy is helping the company, he said.&quot;Even if you can&#39;t say that each pink dot equals $372, I think the things Sun has been doing with open source and OpenSolaris and Java and so forth have translated into improved relevancy and an improved perception of Sun, and at some level, logic suggests that this played a role in their improved financial picture.&quot;
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Sun Microsystems on Tuesday unveiled Version 7 of the companyâs enterprise development tool suite, Sun Java Studio Enterprise, and previewed a JVM that will support 64-bit AMD Opteron processors.
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OCTOBER 01, 2004  - Sun Microsystems Inc. this week released Java 2 Platform Standard Edition (J2SE) 5.0, an upgrade of its programming language with more than 100 new features designed to bolster
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Sun Microsystems (Quote, Chart) announced the availability of two upgrades to its software development platforms on Tuesday. Java Studio Enterprise (JSE) 7, the Santa Clara, Calif.
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InfoWorld - The key to Sun&#39;s success going forward is increased adoption of its Solaris 10 operating system, company CEO Jonathan Schwartz said Tuesday.
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InfoWorld - Sun is working on a long list of potential features for the planned JDK (Java Development Kit) 7, which is based partially on the upcoming Java Standard Edition (SE) 7.
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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) - The Eclipse Foundation at the EclipseWorld 2006 conference in Cambridge, Mass., this week plans to tout the progress of open source projects focused on desktop application development, PHP (Hypertext Processor) and embedded Java. Honing in on a recent Evans Data survey that Eclipse and several member organizations funded, Eclipse will herald an annual growth rate of 130 percent in the number of respondents building applications based on Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform). The RCP is Eclipse's answer to the Windows juggernaut for development of desktop applications. Approximately 22 percent of the 400 respondents in this year's survey indicated they were building applications based on RCP. RCP features Equinox, which is a component framework based on the OSGi standard, and the ability to deploy native GUI applications to several desktop operating systems including Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Also featured is an integrated update mechanism for deploying desktop applications from a central server. Although development of applications for the Web has been taking the headlines lately, rich client applications still have a place, said Mike Milinkovich, Eclipse executive director. There will always be a need for applications on the desktop that take advantage of local computing resources and can work in both disconnected and connected fashions. While RCP can be used for building Windows applications, Eclipse views it as a competitor to the Windows platform. "[RCP] has the additional advantage that you can take applications and run on Linux, Mac, and Windows, but we definitely see this as an alternative to Windows .Net," Milinkovich said. Organizations such as SAS Institute, NASA, and the US Army feature RCP in applications, he said. Eclipse also has a new project just getting started for rich Internet applications, called the Rich AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Platform project Also at the show, Eclipse plans to talk about upcoming developments such as the impending release of its PHP IDE project. "We are expecting our PHP tools project to be making [its] first release in Q4," Milinkovich said. "In Q4, we're expecting our Mobile Tools for Java project to be shipping and our embedded RCP project will be shipping as well," Milinkovich said. Mobile Tools for Java features a set of development tools for programmers building applications for mobile devices running Java. Embedded RCP is a runtime to extend the RCP to embedded devices. In the next few months, Eclipse plans maintenance releases to fix any bugs in its Callisto project, which was launched in June and featured the simultaneous release of 10 open source projects. The first maintenance release is on Sept. 29 while a second is planned for approximately Feb. 1, 2007. Also at EclipseWorld, Instantiations is announcing Version 2.0 of RCP Developer, which is a development tool for building Eclipse RCP applications. The new version adds a Help Composer feature, to ease documentation, and extends Linux support for the RCP Packager and WindowTester features. WindowTester feature automates testing of GUIs for Linux while RCP Packager streamlines the build and deployment process. Version 2.0 is centered on making it easier to focus on developing business logic rather than maintaining infrastructure code. Eclipse on Sept. 11, meanwhile, plans to have a creation review for the Eclipse Orbit Project. The project will provide a repository of bundled versions of third-party libraries that are approved for use in one or more Eclipse projects, according to the Eclipse Web site. Older versions of such libraries will be maintained by the repository as well. "One of the key issues with the current situation is the inconsistency in naming, versioning, and form of bundled third party libraries. This project will, as a mainline activity, provide a repository of approved and bundled third party libraries to authorized project teams. This eliminates duplicated work and bundle naming, structuring and versioning variations," the Eclipse site said. Also on Sept. 11, Eclipse will be reviewing its AspectJ Development Tools Project for aspect-oriented software development (AOSD), according to the organization's Web site. "The AspectJ Development Tools (AJDT) project provides Eclipse platform-based tool support for AOSD with AspectJ," the Eclipse site said.
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Sun is expected to announce next week that it will make the Sun SPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology) device platform available via open source, but a user expressed concerns about Sun's commitment to the technology.Sun SPOT is a Java-based experimental platform intended to enable development of products like wireless sensors, robotics, and communication devices. The open-sourcing is expected to be made official at the Java Mobile &amp; Embedded Developer Days Conference in Santa Clara, Calif., which is being held January 23-24."In this case, I think what's a little bit different is it's not just open-sourcing just the Sun SPOT code," said Roger Brinkley, mobile and embedded community leader at Sun. "It's everything related to Sun SPOT. It's the hardware, it's the software."Included in the open source endeavor would be the Squawk virtual machine featured as part of Sun SPOT. Through the open-source move, Sun hopes to attract more developers to Sun SPOT. "The open-sourcing allows a lot more extension and development to occur," Brinkley said.The plan calls for Sun SPOT to be offered under the GNU General Public License version 2, which means derivatives of GPL code and code that is combined with it must be redistributed. Sun, however, previously has permitted use of the "ClassPath" exception to the GPL, which enables combining of proprietary code with GPL ClassPath libraries without the need to redistribute proprietary code.Contacted afterward, Sun SPOT user Bruce Boyes, president of Systronix, lauded the technology but had concerns about Sun's commitment to it. By classifying the technology as experimental, Sun shows no published commitment to make it available for any period of time commercially, he said. Systronix has been trying to get a commercial license for two years, he said.?"SPOT is a very cool educational and experimental device. We'd like it to become a great commercial and industrial device too. Systronix would like to help make that happen," Boyes said. Systronix is using Sun SPOT in robots, which could be networked and potentially be used in applications, such as roaming of airports to provide security. "We use the Sun SPOT as the application brain," said Boyes.He also expressed concerns about the GPL, which has requirements that can place limits on its use in commercial ventures since software involving it has to be contributed back to the open-source arena. "Open-sourcing would be most interesting if there was a reasonable path to a commercial license," Boyes said.Sun officials were not available to respond to Boyes's concerns on Friday afternoon.In other happenings at next week's conference, application developers in the mobile and embedded space will get together to learn about different topics ranging from virtual machines to mobile clients. Presentations will be done by representatives from such companies as Nokia, Intel and, of course, Sun. James Gosling, CTO of Sun's Client Software who is widely considered the father of Java, will give a keynote presentation on Wednesday.Java, according to to Sun, is on 95 percent of mobile phones shipped today. Sun makes money off of mobile and embedded Java through commercial licenses that feature support services.One topic that is not expected to get a lot of play at the event is Sun's JavaFX and JavaFX Mobile technology. The JavaFX platform, featuring JavaFX Mobile, is intended to provide a consistent and graphical user experience on systems ranging from desktops to mobile devices and other systems. More on JavaFX will be aired at the JavaOne conference in May in San Francisco, a Sun insider said.Currently, Sun's new acquisition, MySQL, maker of the open source database of the same name, has not been factored into Sun's mobile plans, according to Brinkley. Sun agreed to acquire MySQL this week for $1 billion, with the deal expected to close later this quarter or early in the next quarter.
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The Story: Java, the oldest new programming language around, is falling out of favor with developers. When it comes to developing the increasingly common rich Internet applications, Java is losing ground to Ruby on Rails, PHP, AJAX and other cool new languages. And there are even reports that Microsoft?s .Net, of all things, is pushing Java out of the enterprise. Makes you wonder whether Sun was smart to change its stock-ticker code to JAVA last summer.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    Simply put, developers are saying that Java slows them down. ?There were big promises that Java would solve incompatibility problems [across platforms]. But now there are different versions and different downloads, creating complications,? says Peter Thoneny, CEO of Twiki.net, which produces a certified version of the open source Twiki wiki-platform software. ?It has not gotten easier. It?s more complicated,? concurs Ofer Ronen, CEO of Sendori, which routes domain traffic to online advertisers and ad networks. Sendori has moved to Ruby on Rails. Ronen says Ruby offers pre-built structures ? say, a shopping cart for an e-commerce site ? that you?d have to code from the ground up using Java.Another area of weakness is the development of mobile applications. Java?s UI capabilities and its memory footprint simply don?t measure up, says Samir Shah, CEO of software testing provider Zephyr. No wonder the mobile edition of Java has all but disappeared, and no wonder Google is creating its own version (Android).These weaknesses are having a real effect. Late last month, Info-Tech Research Group said its survey of 1,850 businesses found .Net the choice over Java among businesses of all sizes and industries, thanks to its promotion via Visual Studio and SharePoint. Microsoft is driving uptake of the .Net platform at the expense of Java," says George Goodall, a senior research analyst at Info-Tech.One bit of good news: developers and analysts agree that Java is alive and well for internally developed enterprise apps. ?On the back end, there is still a substantial amount of infrastructure available that makes Java a very strong contender,? says Zephyr?s Shah.The Bottom Line: Now that Java is no longer the unchallenged champ for Internet-delivered apps, it makes sense for companies to find programmers who are skilled in the new languages. If you?re a Java developer, now?s the time to invest in new skills.Complete list of 2007 underreported stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers