Sun Proposes Do-It-All Cloud

SAN FRANCISCO—Sun Microsystems has a plan to take the company into the cloud computing era and enable developers as well as designers to build and host applications in the Sun environment.

In a wide-ranging effort known as Project Hydrazine, Sun plans to use most of its core pieces of technology to deliver a turnkey hosted solution allowing developers to leverage the Sun platform to create applications and services and monetize them without going anywhere else.

Indeed, Sun has all the pieces, many in place now or soon to be in place, to pull off a strategy that no other vendor appears prepared to do, said Bob Brewin, Sun distinguished engineer and chief technology officer for software at the systems company.

Click here to read more about the applications and projects Sun is delivering to support its JavaFX technology.

In an interview with eWEEK at the JavaOne conference here on May 6, Brewin said Project Hydrazine will consist of a network environment, a data center and other infrastructure components such as Sun's JavaFX rich Internet application technology, Sun's GlassFish application server, the Sun enterprise service bus, the Sun directory server, MySQL, "cheap storage" and Sun hardware.

In addition, there will be a repository "where you can store services that run on the cloud," he said, as well as a repository of metadata to be used and reused in building applications.

Project Insight to fold in analytics

Also as part of Project Hydrazine, Sun is introducing Project Insight, an analytics capability that will give developers the ability to know who is using their products "and be able to inject advertising, monetize or somehow leverage it," Brewin said.

"Sitting on the side of this will be a developer environment and developer hosting services. … We want to make it as easy as possible for developers and designers to create and leverage applications," he said, noting that developers will likely use the services differently than designers. "A designer might take existing services and combine them in unique ways to create mashups," Brewin said.

In terms of hosting, he said, "a connected developer within their IDE [integrated development environment] can just hit run and their application is deployed to the cloud. This is much like we've eliminated the deploy cycle on Java EE [Java Platform, Enterprise Edition]."

The cloud portion of Hydrazine will feature "an extensible container that allows you to run apps—like Amazon EC2 or Google App Engine," Brewin said.