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As part of its ongoing initiative to appeal to developers, Sun Microsystems announced two new developer programs on March 21.
One program is the Sun Developer Expert Assistance program, which is offered in conjunction with Sun Services and provides e-mail-based technical assistance for individual developers anywhere in the world, said Jean Elliott, director of developer marketing at Sun.
Sun Developer Expert Assistance is the first offering from Sun to provide individual developers with specialized advice for programming issues on a per-request basis with guaranteed response times, which can help shorten their development and deployment cycles. The service costs $99 per request.
Supported projects include NetBeans, Sun Java Studio Creator, Sun Java Studio Enterprise, Sun Studio 11 and Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE).
The other new program, the Sun Community Champions Program, enables members of the Sun Developer Network community to promote their experiences with Sun technologies and tools. Participants in this program have a chance to be recognized for their achievements by their peers and by Sun, the company said.
Meanwhile, Sun, also on March 21, announced the release of a preview version of the NetBeans C/C++ Development Pack. The plug-in is supported in NetBeans 5.0 and preview versions of NetBeans 5.5
This preview version of the NetBeans C/C++ Development Pack enables developers to edit, compile and build C and C++ applications on multiple platforms, including Solaris, Linux and Windows, the company said.
The preview Pack also includes a variety of features to support the C and C++ developer, including editor syntax highlighting, easier code browsing via hyperlinks between invocation and declaration, a makefile wizard, and templates for building C/C++ libraries and applications.
“The NetBeans community has demanded this. Developers were unhappy with the current offerings in the marketplace for an open multi-language, multi-platform, native development environment, and this milestone is the first response from the NetBeans community,” said Tim Cramer, director Java Tools at Sun, in a statement. “The rapid momentum in this area signals not only the flexibility and simplicity of the NetBeans plug-in mechanism, but the intention of the NetBeans project to support additional programming languages.”
Elliott said Sun has “made developers a strategic priority for the corporation this year. We have a thrust around attracting developers and then inspiring them with our software to use our hardware.”
In addition, Elliott said the Sun Community Champions program enables developers to make themselves more publicly available to work with the community. “From my perspective, theyre the ultimate focus group,” she said. “From them we get extremely valuable feedback. We are in the midst of this huge culture change in how we do development and how we communicate.”