NetBeans, OpenSolaris Also in Spotlight at JavaOne

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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 (define) and the
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 effort was inspired by the newer and more versatile
RPM and Yum, which are used to update Linux installations.

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.
This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.