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Sun Microsystems is upgrading its Solaris Express Developer Edition software.
The Santa Clara, Calif., software and systems maker announced new support subscriptions and enhanced GUIs to make its Solaris Express Developer Edition software easier for developers to install and use, said Dan Roberts, director of marketing for Solaris and OpenSolaris at Sun.
The new support offerings and usability enhancements in Solaris Express Developer Edition 9/07 software, announced Sept. 24, are designed to provide a faster route to productivity developing for the Solaris operating system, Java platform and Web 2.0 applications, Roberts said.
Sun Solaris Express Developer Edition is a free, quarterly release of Suns next-generation Solaris operating system built from the source code repository at OpenSolaris.org, Roberts said.
“This edition is aimed at lowering the barrier for developers to get up and running on Solaris,” Roberts told eWEEK.
The Solaris Express Developer Edition 9/07 software offers a new Solaris installer, the first significant change to the installer since the release of Solaris 8, Roberts said.
Another new feature of Solaris Express Developer Edition software is D-Light, a new GUI front-end tool to Suns dynamic tracing technology, known as DTrace. Roberts said D-Light brings the advantages of DTraces system-level performance measurement capabilities to a much wider developer audience. Moreover, D-Light provides an extensible library of profiling technology to help users quickly profile and peer into the runtime behavior of a program. The operating system also features the Sun Studio 12 compilers and the NetBeans 5.5 IDE (integrated development environment), he said.
Click here to read more about new versions of NetBeans tools.
Meanwhile, Roberts said Sun customers can now get installation and configuration support for Solaris Express Developer Edition software and the Solaris 10 operating system in a single subscription, at the Basic level of support for Solaris subscriptions and at no additional cost. The new options enable Sun to provide services that scale with a companys business. Developer support is available through the Sun Developer Expert Assistance service. A Solaris subscription with indemnification coverage is also available, he said.
In addition, other enhancements to the Developer Edition include new wireless drivers and support for Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology, the chip makers power management architecture. Roberts said the SpeedStep support demonstrates Suns focus on developers through the Solaris Express Developer Edition release by enhancing support for laptops, the development platform of choice for many developers.
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