Sun announces open sourcing of its premier Web Server product line...
I am excited to share the good news that Sun today announced its decision to open source the core kernel of Sun Java System Web Server under BSD license.
If you wonder as to why are we doing this , here are the top reasons that come to my mind.
- Sun's new found open source love !!! The recently open sourced
products from Sun like OpenJDK, OpenSolaris, Netbeans, GlassFish to name a few, have
all been adopted very well within the open source community.
- I guess, Sun understands that there is still lot more innovation to happen within the 'Web Server' land and wants to be a part of this by sharing its innovation / IP within the rest of the open source community. This step should trigger cross pollination within other
popular open source web servers like Apache HTTP server and LightHTTPd. Note that Sun wants to partner with these open source communities and not compete with them !.
If you have never head of Sun Java System Web Server ever before (it is sad but definitely possible) then you might be wondering as to what the heck is this Sun Web Server product. So, here is a brief history of the product line :
- Introduced to the world as Netscape Enterprise Web Server from Netscape Communications Inc in early 1997
- Sun partnered with Netscape Communications in late 1990's and early 2000's and released iPlanet Enterprise Server 6.x release
- Since Netscape went away, Sun has continuously invested in enhancing the scalability side of its product line and released Sun Java System (for a brief time also known as Sun ONE) Web Server 6.1
- Over the last 2 years, Sun used its Sun Java System Web Server 6.1 , 7.0 Update 3 and Solaris 10 products to demonstrate the scalability, performance/watt of its Sun Fire T2000/T5120 servers by repeatedly holding SpecWeb'2005 world record. You can get more information about these world records from here, here and here.
- Since fall of 2006, Sun has made its Web Server free to use - both in development as well as in production. Af course, paid customers have enjoyed production support, urgent bug fixes and indemnification. Now, this will continue to be the same even after today's decision.
Now that the great decision has been made, we - engineers - can go back to our kennel and work on the actual job of putting together a build system so that every one can build and play with it. Hopefully, you guys will be able to download the source and use it before fall'08.
Meanwhile, you are more than welcome to download Sun Java System Web Server and use it for free from here.
Posted by BeleniX on July 24, 2008 at 10:53 AM PDT #
"Note that Sun wants to partner with these open source communities and not compete with them !. "
This particular project I don't think is as likely to be misconstrued that way as opensolaris.. but thanks for the clarification.
Anyways, you guys are awesome; keep up the amazing work!
Posted by ethana2 on July 24, 2008 at 09:18 PM PDT #
this is very nice.. I can't wait to see the WS advancing in it's new open source fashion...
just for reference, here are some numbers from last year comparing Sun's JSWS with apache's http://www.serverwatch.com/sreviews/article.php/3671526
Posted by Phobos on July 26, 2008 at 07:07 AM PDT #
>Sun today announced its decision to open source the core kernel
^^^^^^^^^^^
Why only the "core kernel" and not all of the Web server and what's included in "core kernel" ? Or is it that other components are going to be under different license?
Curious minds want to know.
Posted by I Love SOWS even more now on July 28, 2008 at 07:59 PM PDT #
thanks for all your interests. currently, sun web server includes the following components
a) core kernel - includes http processing, file cache,fastcgi and reverse proxy
b) web container - to process servlet and jsp.
c) admin server to manage the server instances in cluster environment. this component depends on lot of other components which are currently available within open source.
initially, sun managementś thinking seems to want to start with the core kernel and see the response before deciding on opening up the rest of the stack.
Posted by Sriram Natarajan on July 29, 2008 at 12:15 AM PDT #
Thanks - I might finally be able to see why my complicated NSAPI works the way it does!
I think the management is spot on - I for one do not need the admin server and hardly any one uses the Servlet/JSP container (outside of Sun, that is)!
BTW, I use the SOWS 6.1 in lot of our production environments and while on Solaris it is rock solid, on HP-UX it is sometimes flakey. Hopefully when the code becomes available, it will do well on all platforms.
Posted by I Love SOWS even more now on July 29, 2008 at 06:05 PM PDT #
Posted by Marina Sum's Blog on August 12, 2008 at 10:51 AM PDT #