Open-Source Tools Fuel Web, Desktop Development

Sun Microsystems' Sun Web Stack, an integrated enterprise-quality AMP for Solaris and Linux, is ready to roll, and the core components of the Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 and Sun Java System Web Proxy are open source. Sun hopes it means faster time to market for Web developers.

Open-source community developers have been awash in news this summer, particularly the past few weeks surrounding the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, July 21-25 in Portland, Ore.

Sun Microsystems on July 23 announced the availability of the Sun Web Stack, an integrated enterprise-quality AMP (Apache/MySQL/Perl or PHP) stack for Solaris and Linux operating systems. The Web Stack software includes the software most commonly used for Web-tier application development and services.  The Web Stack is available for download at http://www.sun.com/webstack.

Sun also announced that it is open-sourcing the core components of the Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 and Sun Java System Web Proxy technologies under a BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) license in the Web Stack subproject of the OpenSolaris community. The Web and Proxy source code will be available in the third quarter of this year.

"By open-sourcing the core technology in our Web and Proxy server, Sun's goal is to give developers more flexibility, choice and help them achieve faster time to market," said Karen Tegan Padir, vice president of engineering for Software Infrastructure at Sun. 

Meanwhile, Sun and Joyent announced a collaboration aimed at accelerating the development and deployment of social applications for Facebook and OpenSocial environments. The program lets developers deploy their social applications on an open infrastructure at no initial cost, by providing up to 12 months free Web hosting on Joyent's Cloud, a flexible first-class infrastructure powered by OpenSolaris on Sun's servers, as well as training on Web-scale application development,

In conjunction with this offering, Sun and Joyent are organizing a multi-city Social App Tour to offer training on developing Web-scale social applications on the Cloud. The tour will travel to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Vancouver, British Columbia, Chicago, Boston, New York, Dallas and Austin, Texas, between September and December.