What's exciting at Sun right now.
Tuesday Dec 11, 2007
Being involved with the brilliant Campus Ambassador team that we have here, helps me take a holistic view at the way things are shaping up at Sun, technology-wise. Sure, I have fewer ideas when it comes to the servers/hardware space - but in the whole Open Source domain, there is a lot of interesting stuff going on. Here are few of the things I'm most excited about:
1. Sun SPOTs
This is something not many of you might've heard about. Sun SPOTs (Small Programmable Object Technology) are kits having 3 small devices. Two of them are identical, and this is where all the action takes place. The third unit - it the "base station" of sorts to talk to the other two. The best past is that, these devices run a specially built JVM for such devices called Squawk. So, this allows you to code in Netbeans, get the SPOT module, say "deploy to Sun SPOT", and you're done! I'm personally very excited about receiving my SPOT kit - we're planning to use it for this huge competition coming up. This is our competitive advantage - so more details only when the "top-secret" mission is actually done!
2. Indiana
Yes, yes - I know. Everyone is talking about this! I got my developer preview as soon as it was released. My greatest request for the Solaris-of-old was a really decent installer. I must say that the guys at the Caiman team have done an excellent job. Apart from that there is the much-awaited Distro-Constructor which is a part of the Caiman project. I personally think, this idea is more "cool" than really useful - but I've really not seen anything of this kind myself in the Linux world - so for Solaris to do this, in such an early phase of Indiana, is brilliant.
3. Netbeans 6
I have used Eclipse quite extensively for one project that I was working on - so I'm in quite a good position to do the famous "Eclipse vs Netbeans" face-off. But - I will not. The only thing I can say is that, after having followed discussions in the Eclipse community over the GUI builder like Netbean's Matisse - I don't think something that good is coming to the Eclipse platform anytime soon. Netbeans supports everything, of course, from Ruby, JRuby to the older traditional J2EE stacks. I'm looking forward to see, how Netbeans can react and provide support to Google's Android platform. They've chosen Eclipse for some reason to start of with - but I'm sure, that Netbeans will come up with Android support soon.
There are more things of course - and I will hopefully talk about them soon.
Till then, check out stuff from FOSS.IN at the Sun FOSS.IN blog and excellent photo-rep.
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Hi Abhishek,
I am also asking my self how can An...