Sun upgrades J2SE platform
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InfoWorld - Application developers got several new options last week as Sun Microsystems updated J2SE, Borland upped its CORBA ante, and Compuware announced products that will work with Microsoft&#8217;s Visual Studio 2005 toolbox.
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All roads lead to Java Sun Microsystems is expected to release an updated version of Java, featuring integrated support for scripting languages and providing a migration path to enterprise Java, today.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Sun is taking a page from Microsoft's security group and changing the way it updates Java for the desktop. On Tuesday, Sun announced that it will start providing advance notification of its Java SE (Standard Edition) security updates and that it will also scrap its controversial practice of staggering the release of Java patches. Instead, it will release updates for all supported Java SE platforms simultaneously. Sun Spokeswoman Jacki Decoster said that the changes were designed to make it easier for enterprises to patch all of their Java systems at once. But Sun's new system also happens to remedy what some had called a serious security risk. In July,Â eEye Digital Security CTO Marc Maiffret blasted Sun for waiting months between the release of some versions of its desktop Java. In January, Maiffret's company had discovered a serious bug in the Java Network Launching Protocol, which is used to run Java programs over the Web. But Sun made its fix for the problem available to developers several weeks beforeÂ it pushed out the update to the Java community at large. Though this practice gave attackers a chance to reverse-engineer Sun's security fixes and use them against some of Sun's 800 million desktop users, surprisingly, the Java platform has only rarely been targeted, said Andrew Storms, director of security operations with nCircle Network Security. "It's still the number-one platform for IT enterprise development in-house. But we haven't seen a whole lot of attacks against it." Besides staggering developer and end-user releases, Sun would also wait before releasing updates to users of older versions of Java. Previously, it was standard practice for Sun to fix older versions of Java, such as J2SE 5.0 and J2SE 1.4, weeks or even months after it had patched the latest Java SE 6 software. That will all change under the new system, which will offer simultaneous developer and end-user releases for these three versions of Java. However, users of J2SE 1.3 will have to wait until next year before their software is updated at the same time as the rest of the platform, Decoster said. She could not say whether Sun planned to offer this type of synchronized release for its embedded or server-based Java platforms, Java ME (Micro Edition) and Java EE (Enterprise Edition). Sun's advance notifications will not be released according to a pre-set schedule, as is the case with Microsoft and Oracle, but they will come out within a week of the actual security patches, Decoster said. Customers can receive the advance notifications via e-mail or read about them on Sun's security blog , she added.
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Sun Microsystems is readying an upgrade to its enterprise-level application server and is touting new downloading figures as evidence of the companyâs growing presence in the application server market.
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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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JBoss Application Server 4.0, middleware recently certified for J2EE, is ready for enterprise production deployment, according to JBoss.
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As hardware gets more powerful, Sun expects the desktop version of Java to gradually replace the stripped-down mobile version. Will it un-fragment Java for gadgets?
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(InfoWorld) - Sun is announcing Monday the release of the GlassFish version 2 open-source application server, which features enterprise-level capabilities for running large-scale applications. The company also will offer a beta release of the upcoming open-source NetBeans 6.0 IDE, which accommodates scripting languages. While the first version of GlassFish was intended for developers, the follow-up release due Monday is intended to place GlassFish in the vein of an enterprise-level application server. Highlighted capabilities include clustering, data replication, and centralized administration of server clusters. Improved interoperability between Web services hosted on Java and Microsoft also is featured as part of a Web services stack dubbed "Project Metro." "This is an outgrowth of our relationship with Microsoft," said Ken Drachnik, Sun open-source community marketing manager. The "Open ESB" capability in version 2 enables integration of Web services and existing enterprise resources. Java Business Integration support provides a standardized approach to delivering SOA via Web services, Sun said. Performance also has been dramatically improved with version 2, according to Sun. GlassFish version 2 is based on Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5. Sun will base its own commercially supported application server, Sun Java System Application Server 9.1, on GlassFish version 2. It will feature an approximately 75 percent price reduction to $4,500 for an annual subscription for four sockets. Sun rivals in the application server space, including JBoss and BEA Systems, have participated in the GlassFish development community because they can leverage technologies available in it, such as the application server's JAXB (Java Architecture for XML Binding) technology, Sun officials said. GlassFish version 2's performance was lauded by analyst Joe Niski of the Burton Group. "I think the performance improvements are pretty good," said Niski, who also mentioned the clustering capabilities as worthwhile. "The basic J2EE application servers are getting more and more commoditized. There are so many free ones out there. This provides really commercial-level performance and scalability to basically a free offering," said Niski. GlassFish has served as reference implementation of Java. It also has been integrated with the NetBeans IDE, allowing developers to deploy SOA applications using business process execution language workflows. With NetBeans 6.0, the IDE moves beyond its Java origins to accommodate scripting languages, JavaScript and Ruby in particular. "The Ruby support is very important because it allows us to really talk to an entirely new segment of developers," said Gregg Sporar, NetBeans evangelist at Sun. "We have room inside the tent for more than just Java developers," Sporar said. The Matisse GUI builder in NetBeans 6.0 supports the Swing framework for building desktop applications and Beans Binding for modifying user interface controls to accommodate back-end data source changes. Also, the code editor in 6.0 has been rewritten and optimized. The profiler, for checking performance problems like memory leaks, now enables developers to stop execution of an application so they can examine what is happening within the program. Version 6.0 integrates with the Subversion version control system. General availability for NetBeans 6.0 is planned for the end of this year. The IDE first was offered in an early-access format at the JavaOne conference in May. Future distributions of NetBeans, starting with the production release of version 6.0, will be offered under either the Common Development and Distribution License or the GNU GPL (General Public License) version 2. Extending NetBeans to GPL is expected to make the platform more attractive to Linux developers.
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Oracle plans tomorrow to introduce Oracle Application Server 10g Release 2, a significant upgrade with improvements in Java, Web services and identity management, as well as support for RFID technology.
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As a founding member of Sun&#39;s J2EE organization, Tegan-Padir managed the creation of specifications, compatibility test suites, blueprints and guided implementations of Java in the enterprise.
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Former rivals Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have been working together to make their products more compatible -- permitting Windows to run on Sun&#39;s hardware and making StarOffice and Java Runtime Environment compatible with XP SP2.
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A new push is on for a smarter, less finicky Java mobile architecture -- with the goal of making it easier for Java/J2ME architects and devs to design, deploy, develop and manage mobile apps.
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Sun Microsystems on Tuesday said there have been 1.9 million downloads of an upgraded version of J2SE to correct a possible security vulnerability in the JVM, although there have been no attacks reported based on the problem.
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InfoWorld - Borland Software this week is rolling out an upgrade to its Together enterprise modeling tool for the Eclipse platform, featuring SOA capabilities.
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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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After being blasted by security researchers, Sun is changing the way it updates Java.
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(InfoWorld) - SunÂ 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. To illustrate the problem, eEye points to a recent flaw in the Java Runtime Environment, used to run programs that are written in Java. In January, eEye discovered a serious bug in the Java Network Launching Protocol, which is used to run Java programs over the Web. Hackers could exploit this flaw by setting up a malicious Web site that could install unauthorized software on any Java-enabled PC that visited it, according to eEye. The flaw was patched in late June, but Sun has yet to push out the fix to its millions of Java users worldwide. Instead, Sun has made a developer release available on its Java.sun.com download page and is holding off on a more widespread release of the fix. The reason? So that developers can make sure that the update itself is bug-free. "There's an additional round of testing that happens before we blast it out to consumers," said Sun Spokeswoman Jacki Decoster. The problem with this approach is that a staggered release schedule gives criminals a window of opportunity to reverse engineer the Java bug and then create attack code that can be targeted at the millions of unpatched users, said Marc Maiffret, CTO with eEye. "Sun has such a horrible update process that they released patches for this flaw a couple weeks ago, and more patches for different versions [after that]," he said. "If people were reverse-engineering the patch a few weeks ago, they have a head start on the good guys." Microsoft releases security patches for all versions of its products simultaneously, but Sun is not the only company to stagger updates. Oracle, for example, habitually releases database patches for some of the less-popular operating system platforms weeks after its initial security updates. Leaving Java users unprotected like this not a good idea, said Cesar Cerrudo, CEO of Argeniss Information Security. But with Sun expecting to push out a fix for the problem later this week, hackers are not getting a lot of time to develop attack code, he said.