The fact that OpenSolaris won a 2006 Codie probably isn't news to anyone except those of us behind in reading our email. Having said that, the thing that jumped off the web page for me was some of the competition in the Best Open Source Solution category.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 was also a finalist (but they didn't win, did I mention that OpenSolaris did?).

We appear to be establishing a bit of a trend as last year Red Hat Desktop was beaten out by NetBeans 3.6 in the same category.

Technorati Tags Solaris Red Hat Linux OpenSolaris NetBeans

This years JavaOne has been an absolute whirlwind. It's usually not that big a Solaris event but this year the requests for interviews from the media and analysts have been somewhat overwhelming so I haven't been able to get on to the show floor as much as I'd like. The good news is that, as of last night, we'd DTraced 5 apps and hadn't had to give away any iPods. Interestingly we have doubled the performance of one application and reduced the startup time on another by almost 70%.

Traffic hasn't been as high as last year but we can probably attribute that to the fact that Adam wasn't on stage shilling for us like he was last year.

More later....

Technorati Tags Solaris DTrace JavaONE

It's back! After last years successful run we will once again issue the Solaris Performance Challenge at JavaOne. If you are coming to JavaOne next week, you can enter to receive a performance improvement for your Java application, otherwise you'll get an iPod or a Sony PSP.

If you‘re a developer coming to JavaOne this year, visit the Solaris pods (#737 and #739) at the Sun booth to check out what the most advanced operating system on the planet has to offer.

Bring us your Java™ applications (on a CD-ROM, USB drive or a plain old laptop with an ethernet card) and we‘ll use Solaris 10 to improve their performance. If we can‘t find any additional performance gains for your app, you‘ll win a cool prize such as an iPod or a Sony PSP.

Please bear in mind that this only applies to real world applications, “Hello World” and benchmarks don‘t really count, the basic rules are: 1) This applies to real-world applications which serve a useful purpose in a production environment only. 2) Your application must contain at least 2,000 lines of *code*. 3) Your application should run with JVM 1.5 or later. 4) If your application runs in an application server, it must be the latest version of Sun Java System Application Server, BEA Weblogic, or IBM WebSphere. If your app doesn't meet these requirements, come over anyway, we‘ll take a shot at it but if we don‘t get an improvement, you don‘t get a prize.

The Legal Stuff™ Offer open to all conference attendees 18 years of age or older, except employees of Sun Microsystems and residents of countries subject to US embargo. Offer valid only while supplies last.

Last year, we worked on 16 applications with *15* of those getting performance increases of between 5% and 280% so it's worth a look.