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Sun Microsystems is kicking off this JavaOne week with a host of news regarding its OpenSolaris operating system and NetBeans integrated development environment.
Company officials made the announcements May 5 at Sun’s CommunityOne Developer Conference, which essentially is a prelude to the JavaOne event that runs May 6-9 in San Francisco.
At CommunityOne, Sun and the OpenSolaris community announced the availability of OpenSolaris, in a distribution that had previously been known as Project Indiana. OpenSolaris is based on the Solaris kernel and created through community collaboration. The operating system can be downloaded here.
Is Sun’s CEO a spokesperson for the open-source community? Click here to read more.
Jim McHugh, vice president of Solaris marketing, described OpenSolaris as “the first OS to feature ZFS as its default file system, protecting work with instant roll-back and continual check-summing capabilities to allow users to test ideas. Its DTrace (Dynamic Tracing) feature provides safe, pervasive observability of production systems to accelerate application development and optimization of the AMP/MARS [Multiuser Archival and Retrieval System] stack. Additionally, Solaris Containers let you build virtualization-aware applications that can be deployed on more than 1000 systems, from single machines through multi-CPU and multicore systems, without worrying whether integrating third-party software will work.”
McHugh told eWEEK, “We’re also announcing the fact that if a developer would rather use OpenSolaris in a cloud situation, we have a deal with Amazon.”
Amazon and the OpenSolaris community announced the availability of OpenSolaris on the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) for on-demand and storage services, said Rajesh Ramchandani, senior market development manager for Solaris at Sun. Through the OpenSolaris-Amazon alliance, customers will have access to the benefits of open-source community environments with a proven, solid development infrastructure at startup prices, he said.
In related news, Reliant Security announced that it is leveraging OpenSolaris to improve its payment card data security for merchants that need to meet PCI (Payment Card Industry) data security requirements. “Reliant made a strategic decision to base its Managed PCI System (MPS) product on OpenSolaris because other operating systems didn’t meet our security requirements and system resource constraints. With the support of the OpenSolaris community, we have been able to meet a very aggressive production rollout of MPS and are proud to participate in the launch of the first community distribution of OpenSolaris,” Richard Newman, managing partner of Reliant Security, said in a statement.
NetBeans News Growing
Meanwhile, Sun and the NetBeans community announced the availability of the NetBeans IDE Early Access for PHP scripting language. The move enables Web 2.0 developers using PHP to leverage the NetBeans IDE. Sun also announced the general availability of NetBeans 6.1, the latest version of Sun’s open-source IDE. Both can be downloaded here.
NetBeans IDE Early Access for PHP includes intelligent editing features such as prioritized code completion, instant rename, mark occurrences, dynamic code templates and easy navigation. Outside of the editor, it provides debugging support, deployment to the local server, dynamic help and sample projects intended to make it easier to get started with PHP development, and support for embedded CSS, HTML and JavaScript technologies. More details can be found here.
“Dynamic languages continue to be a major focus for Sun and we are thrilled to provide NetBeans IDE Early Access for PHP to this community,” said Octavian Tanase, senior director of NetBeans Engineering at Sun. “Support for JavaScript technology, integration with MySQL database and a host of other powerful features position NetBeans as a premier IDE for PHP developers everywhere.”
NetBeans 6.1 includes new features for developing AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Web applications using JavaScript technology and delivers tighter integration with the MySQL database.
David Folk, group manager for marketing at NetBeans, said NetBeans 6.1’s JavaScript technology support is based on the dynamic language infrastructure added for the Ruby programming language and includes semantic highlighting, code completion, type analysis, quick fixes, semantic checks and refactoring. Version 6.1 also adds in a browser compatibility feature intended to make it easier to write JavaScript code to run in Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari or Windows Internet Explorer.
In addition, the NetBeans Database Explorer in NetBeans IDE 6.1 makes it easier to create, start and stop MySQL databases and connect to and browse a database’s tables, said Gregg Sporar, a NetBeans technology evangelist. Other new NetBeans features include faster startup and code completion, enhanced support for Ruby and JRuby such as a new Ruby platform manager, and support for the IBM Rational ClearCase version control system, Sporar said.
NetBeans 6.1 also includes enhanced support for Web services. “We have support for REST-ful [Representational State Transfer] Web services,” Sporar said.
Sporar and Folk said NetBeans has closed the gap considerably in its competition with the Eclipse open-source IDE, which maintains the lion’s share of mind share among developers who use an open-source Java IDE.
However, over the last three years, that as begun to change as NetBeans has added a host of new features such as PHP support, support for Ruby and all the new features in NetBeans 6.1, Sporar said. When it comes to whether developers are using one or the other, “the conversation has changed to become one more of ‘and’ rather than an ‘or,'” Folk said, noting that more developers are saying they use both Eclipse and NetBeans, choosing depending on the situation.