Photo courtesy of Barton George 

The ever popular radio voice and blogger -- Barton George had an opportunity to meet up with Charlie Nutter and Thomas Enebo at JavaOne 2008. Check out his podcast, I believe you will find it very enlightening.

Some of the topics they discussed:

• A historical background, Ruby, then Rails, then JRuby.
• What the guys were doing pre-Sun and how Tim Bray lured them to the fiery orb.
• Three licenses is better than one (GPL, CPL, LGPL)
  
• How JRuby is working with GlassFish and NetBeans.
• The DaVinci machine project, jMaki and what ever happened to AJAX?
  
• Might we see a JPerl?
• Looking to get more involved with MySQL

The OpenSolaris Developer Summit 2008 has kicked off in Santa Cruz, CA.

The 2nd annual OpenSolaris Developer Summit is happening this weekend, May 3rd & 4th @ UC Santa Cruz. If you can make it, come on by!" - Stephen Lau, OGB member.

Event: OpenSolaris Developer Summit
What: Convention
Host: OpenSolaris
When: Saturday, May 3 at 9:00am
Where: UC Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California

To see more details and RSVP, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/n/?event.php&eid=12509963758

Jim Grisanzio has posted some early photos at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimgris/sets/72157604857242440/

We've all heard the statistics - with more than 6 million software developers worldwide, Java technology powers more than 5.5 billion devices including mobile phones, smart cards, Blu-ray players, set-top boxes, PCs, car navigations systems and more.

This week the Java ecosystem got even bigger.

Yesterday, Apple announced Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 1 adds support for Java SE 6

And today, Sun, Canonical and Red Hat announced the inclusion of OpenJDK-based implementations in Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support (LTS) Server and Desktop editions.

Barton & Rich both offer some commentary on what this milestone means for Linux developers and users.

You can also check out this Java Posse podcast Barton & Rich did, along with Bruno Souza from Brazil.

Yes, it's true - Neil Young will join Sun on stage during the JavaOne opening keynote session on May 6, at Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Come hear and see what Java technology means to Neil Young as he does a special demo of a new music project.

Day/Time: Tuesday, May 6; 8:30 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.

Who: Rich Green (EVP, Software, Sun Microsystems) will be joined by several special guests, including Neil Young and Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz

Can't make it to JavaOne this year?

The keynote session with Neil Young will also be available via webcast & we'll post some photos in the JavaOne press kit.

You can also view all JavaOne blogs at JavaOne BlogCentral

Sun has released the latest version of the free and open Solaris 10 OS.  Solaris 10 5/08 features a number of key performance enhancements and supports a host of new platforms.  It's available immediately (for free of course) and becomes the preferred version for systems running the Solaris 10 OS.  Larry Wake, group manager, Solaris Software marketing, breaks down what's new with Solaris 10 5/08 and you can dig into all the details of this latest update - including what Solaris 10 customers are saying - right here.

Chief among the new enhancements to Solaris 10 5/08 are platform-tuned power management and optimized support for Intel processors and graphics technology.  New power management features leverage Intel SpeedStep to improve power usage based on a system's performance needs.  This all comes as a result of a special collaboration between the Intel and Sun engineering teams announced a little more than a year ago. 

Also new to Solaris 10 5/08 is the ability for Solaris Containers to support virtualized environments based on earlier versions the OS - Solaris 8 and 9.  This is particularly notable for those who are running a physical instance of Solaris 8 or 9, allowing them to move it to a Solaris 8 or 9 Container running on a Solaris 10 system.  Improvements here also bring a new feature called CPU Capping, which enables an absolute limit to be set on CPU usage for better management of system resources.

All in all, these new updates set a new standard for Solaris 10 which now runs on more than 1,000 x84/x64 and SPARC platforms.  To date, Solaris 10 has set 196 different performance records - with 40 of those records coming on x86 based systems.

As an important final note, all the work being put into Solaris 10 5/08 is happening in tandem with the efforts of the global OpenSolaris community on the OpenSolaris project. Stay tuned to this space and the upcoming CommunityOne conference, being held May 5 in San Francisco, for more details on this front.

Here's something new for the 2008 JavaOne Conference. If you are a student, you can be our guest and attend both the CommunityOne and JavaOne Conferences in San Francisco, May 5 – 9, 2008 for Free.

Join us for 5 days of technical content, meetings with experts and networking with companies such as Sun Microsystems, AMD, Intel, Motorola, Oracle, BEA, Blackberry, BluAge, IBM, InterSystems, JBoss, Microsoft, NAVTEQ, Parasoft, SAP, Terracotta and more than 100 other corporations, organizations and start up companies.

Registration is free but space is limited. Sign up today and get the following benefits:

• Admittance to all general sessions, technology sessions and BOFs at both CommunityOne and JavaOne conferences
• Specially developed Java University classes - just for students
  
• Lunch each day, t-shirts, backpack, coupon for free Java Certification Class
• Access to technology experts and the JavaOne Conference Pavilion
• Entrance to JavaOne AfterDark party

At the Sun Tech Days event this month in St. Petersburg, Russia, Sun's Jim Hughes found a unique way to... um... hammer home a point about the capabilities of Solaris ZFS. Wielding a sledgehammer and standing in front of approximately 2,000 audience members... actually, the video tells the story better than words ever could.  Check out ZFS "Hammer Time" and see for yourself.

Hughes (with hammer) Kirill Nikonchuk and Jim Walker before the hammer swinging began.

A little extreme? Maybe. But the man knows how to make a point about ZFS.  And while a hammer-wielding Sun Fellow may not have been the culprit in your experiences with data corruption or file system failure, perhaps you've got your own war story to tell?  If so, please share.

Java SE for Business is a new product based on Sun's Java SE that offers customers faster access to critical fixes, a longer roadmap for support, and enterprise features designed to reduce the cost of deployment.

For more information, check out this feature story  from Sun.com. In addition, Bill Curci & Roger Calnan recorded this videocast on the announcement:

In a little more than 9 months time, the JRuby community is pleased to announce its second major project release, JRuby 1.1

In a blog post, Thomas Enebo mentions, "The main goal for ver 1.1 was to improve performance. With the help from the community, we have made great strides in performance.There have been more and more reports of applications exceeding Ruby 1.8.6 performance; we are even beating Ruby 1.9 in some micro-benchmarks."

"Thousands of reported issues and unending IRC conversations helped keep JRuby focused on doing what is most important: Making Ruby applications work well," commented Charlie Nutter. "Try your applications against JRuby 1.1 and give us feedback." 

If you find any issues let the JRuby team know via IRC, email the mailing list, or file a bug.

Major features include:

• Compilation of Ruby to Java Bytecode (in AOT and JIT modes)
• Oniguruma port to Java
• Refactored IO implementation
• Improved memory consumption
• Thousands of compatibility fixes

Sun welcomes the new OpenSolaris Governance Board and looks forward to working with them to shape the future of OpenSolaris. 

-- William Franklin, vice president, Solaris Software at Sun Microsystems, Inc.

The new  Board includes the following. Check out their blogs.

• John Beck
• Alan Coopersmith
• Glynn Foster
• Jim Grisanzio
• Simon Phipps
• John Plocher
• Stephen Lau

It's one of the chief concerns for any IT manager or CTO.  How can you ensure your company or organization steers clear of the “Big D”?  In data systems parlance, that stands for “downtime” and whether planned or unplanned, it can be costly.

For many companies, their dog in the fight against downtime is a highly-available (HA) cluster implementation that protects against a single point of failure and ensures business continuity when disaster – whether of the man-made or natural variety – strikes the datacenter.

Today, Sun announced the availability of the latest version of its multi-system, multi-site disaster recovery solution, Solaris Cluster 3.2 2/08.  It manages the availability of applications services and data across local, regional and geographically dispersed datacenters.  Today's announcement of Solaris Cluster 3.2 2/08 brings increased flexibility, ease of use benefits and virtualization support to customers. Among the highlights:

• Support for Logical Domains (LDoms)
• Support of EMC SRDF in a campus cluster configuration
• 8 nodes cluster configuration with x64 servers
• Support for Oracle RAC 10g/11g with EMC SRDF & HDS TrueCopy with Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition 
• GUI enhancements, Service tags and more

That's just a snapshot. For a closer look at Sun's updated Solaris Cluster offering, go here. If you're ready to roll up your sleeves and check it out, there's a free download of      the Solaris Cluster/Java Availability Suite or you can download the latest bits at the Solaris Cluster 3.2 2/08 download page.

Over 300 students joined technologists from Sun at Xiamen University in China on March 8 to learn more about OpenSolaris. The students came from different universities in the Xiamen area. Roger Dong, Joey Guo, and Fiona Duan from Sun covered topics on Open Storage and OpenSolaris. Dr. Wang Hua of the Peking University presented on DTrace and Sun Studio 12 IDE and gave product demos to a group of young and enthusiastic students.

Check it out! Within a few weeks of the completion of the acquisition of MySQL AB, the GlassFish and MySQL communities are announcing the availability of an optimized bundled release. The bundle consists of GlassFish V2 with the MySQL Community Server 5.0 (5.0.51a) and MySQL JDBC driver 5.1.6. It is designed to provide developers with the leading open source versions of enterprise Java and database and giving them easy access to the platforms they need to develop and deploy rich Java and Web applications.

The bundle is available for all the major software platforms including Solaris, Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.

Other benefits include:

• GlassFish supports the latest Web “event driven” technologies such as Ajax and Comet that make for rich customer Web experiences;
  
• Users can freely develop applications on the open source bits and later, when they need support then decide to purchase a subscription to the products from Sun that offer training, support and product updates;
• MySQL is the leading open source database that is very fast, highly scalable and designed for multi user enterprise applications.

Sun has open sourced the StorageTek Storage Archive Manager (SAM) and Sun StorageTek QFS code! This major contribution to the OpenSolaris community is now available for download with additional information here.

We are very excited to take this big step in creating an open source community around SAM-QFS and continuing to grow OpenSolaris as a premier storage OS.

• What does this mean for Sun?

Sun continues to execute against its strategy to open source all of its software. As a result, Sun is changing the storage marketplace. Sun's software is open, and with these source contributions, Solaris and OpenSolaris are well positioned as storage OS's.

• What does this mean for the Storage Community?

Storage developers and deployers interested in these technologies will find more than just access to the source when they participate in the OpenSolaris storage community. They will find an open source community focused entirely on storage. The OpenSolaris storage software stack includes: file systems, file sharing protocols, archive policy management, replication, integrated device drivers, network interoperability software, and the tools and recipes needed to more easily deploy Solaris as a general purpose storage server or appliance.

• What does this mean for Sun's customers?

Our customers will benefit from more choice, value and innovation that comes from open software, open standards and commodity servers and storage hardware.

Check out these sites for additional perspectives.
Ted Pogue
Margaret Hamburger
Lynn Rohrer