Sun Shines Developer Resources for Solaris 10 Launch

Sun Microsystems plans to unwrap new developer resources for Solaris 10 when it officially unveils the highly anticipated new release the Unix OS Monday, a company spokesman said Tuesday.

Sun, Santa Clara, Calif., next week will launch Solaris 10 Developer Connection, a new site hosted by the Sun Developer Network. The new site provides developer guides, software downloads, documentation and forums to help developers create new applications for and migrate existing applications to Solaris 10, said Joe Keller, Sun's vice president of Java Web services and tools marketing.

Also during next Monday's launch, the vendor will highlight an updated version of Java 2, Standard Edition (J2SE) 5.0 Java Developer Kit (JDK) for Solaris 10. Scheduled to ship next quarter for UltraSPARC-, Intel x86- and AMD Opteron-based servers, the kit includes an early-access version of technology to support the creation and deployment of desktop Java applications optimized for Solaris 10 on 64-bit, Opteron-based hardware, Keller said.

The updated J2SE JDK includes a Java virtual machine (JVM) that Sun built in conjunction with AMD to optimize the performance of Java-based applications for Linux, Windows and Solaris environments on 64-bit Opteron-based servers, Keller added.

Additionally, Sun plans to release Monday a preconfigured development environment called the "Technology Test Drive." The hosted environment gives x86 developers a free, seven-day evaluation period in which they can test their own code on Solaris 10. The test drive runs the code on an AMD Opteron-based Sun Fire V20z server.Another Solaris 10 developer resource Sun will highlight at the Solaris 10 launch is a program that helps developers migrate from HP-UX and Tru64 OSes to Solaris 10. The program, which features ISV Early Adoption and Migration for Developers, already has enabled Sun and iForce partners to migrate more than 200 HP customers to Solaris.

Although Linux continues to disrupt the Unix market, Sun and its partners have been looking forward to Solaris 10 and its advancements, which they believe give Sun's proprietary Unix a technical advantage over current Linux distributions.

The Solaris update promises to provide cutting-edge virtualization and workload capabilities through new technology called Solaris Containers. It also will support the ability to run native Linux applications on Solaris, thanks to technology derived from a project code-named Janus.

"There is so much code in Solaris 10, there are features some people have been waiting eons for," said David Auerweck, vice president of strategic markets for Santa Clara, Calif.-based solution provider and Sun partner Helio Solutions.

Auerweck cited Solaris Containers and DTrace -- Solaris 10's new performance-analysis technology -- as two groundbreaking features that Solaris 10 an edge over competing OSes.Sun eventually plans to open-source Solaris 10, but details on exactly when that will happen and which license Sun will use remain sketchy. Keller said Tuesday that Sun will shed more light on that topic at Monday's launch.