The Official Site for Breaking News and the Latest Information from Sun On The Record

Yesterday at the MySQL Conference & Expo, Karen Tegan Padir presented the annual MySQL awards to some of our best customers, partners and open source community contributors.

And the Winners are ...

.

[Read More]

Powered by the Sun Java ME SDK, Samsung Mobile Innovator is a global website and suite of tools that enable the world’s mobile application developers to build Java technology based applications for Samsung’s mobile phones, more quickly and easily.

The features of Samsung SDK 1.1 include
▶ Support for mobile service APIs (MSA) and sensor APIs
▶ Easier integration with IDEs, such as NetBeans and Eclipse
▶ Multi-tasking virtual machine support
▶ Search feature in the SDK toolbar for querying any Samsung Mobile Innovator site’s data
▶ Debugging, performance and optimization tools to help build efficient mobile applications

VirtualBox 2.2 includes some significant performance enhancements and feature updates. You can get all the details here.

One of the most significant new features is support for the new Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard, which enables users to build virtual machines or appliances and effortlessly export them from a development environment and import them into a production environment.

Watch this replay of the VirtualBox Live Show, to get up to speed on the new features of VirtualBox 2.2 and see a demo.

Listen to this Sun News Radio Segment with Sun Senior Product Manager, Andy Hall as he gives host Chhandomay Mandal an update about what's new with VirtualBox 2.2.

With 11 million downloads worldwide, 3.5 million registrations since October 2007 and more than 25,000 downloads a day VirtualBox continues to grow in popularity. Download it here. A mere 50 megabytes, VirtualBox software is incredibly compact and efficient and installs in less than five minutes.

Dave Kearns posted a great article today in his Network World newsletter about Eve Maler, one of the identity management experts at Sun.

It centers around a recent blog post Eve did on a project she and other Sun colleagues are working on to determine "requirements around making the 'everyday identity' experience more responsive to what people want".

As part of their research, they've come up with a web protocol that they're calling  ProtectServe, which would dictate interactions among four parties: a User/User Agent, an Authorization Manager, a Service Provider, and a Consumer.

In addition to her work on Sun's Identity Management team, Dave's article also highlights some of Eve's other accomplishments, including being one of the inventors of XML and a contributor to other industry standards such as SAML and the Liberty Alliance. Plus, she sings in a rock band!

For more on ProtectServe and Eve, check out the article, as well as Eve's blog.

You can also catch up with Eve and Dave at the European Identity Conference this May 5-8 in Munich.

Really cool news today from the OpenSolaris team.

OpenSolaris Toshiba laptops are now available for purchase in the U.S. via the OpenSolaris.com shop.

There are 2 models for you to choose from, the Tecra M10 and the Portege R600

More info available here and via the Getting Started Guide.

As part of “Virtualization Ecosystem Month,” AMD’s month-long celebration of virtualization technology, AMD hosted a webcast with Sun, Oracle & VMWare to talk about hardware-assisted virtualization.

Joost Pronk, virtualization strategist at Sun participated in the event, along with Earl Stahl, AMD VP of Software, Monica Kumar, director marketing Linux & Virtualization, Oracle & Richard A. Brunner, chief platform architect, CTO office, VMware.

The panelists discussed a number of topics, ranging from virtualization adoption, how it’s faring in this current economic climate, to how virtualization is being implemented in data centers & how SMBs can leverage virtualization technologies.

In case you missed the live event, you can catch the replay here.

Russian PC World magazine, Mir PC, has published their list of the "Best Products of 2008".

They look at a long list of technologies for this annual survey - everything from digital cameras & games to developer tools, databases & motherboards

And I'm pleased to say that Sun had 2 winners in the software category!

Sun Studio 12 for "Best Open Source Development Tool"  and  MySQL for "Best Open Source DBMS"

The original story (in Russian) is here.

Since my Russian language skills are nonexistent, the team was kind enough to send me an automatically translated page.

Congratulations!

Found out some interesting news from our Java business team this morning. We've just launched Access Only - a new entry-level addition to the Java SE for Business Program.

The Access Only program is intended for customers who have been using stable Java applications for many years and who do not need technical support to resolve problems. It provides extended access to Java -- 10 years from initial release -- without any support.

This means that customers could continue to use their legacy applications (which are often tied to a specific version of the Java platform) and know that they are secure - without having to pay for support that they don't want.

With Access Only, customers will have access to the latest security updates such as the release of J2SE 1.4.2_20 released on 3/24/09 or any release of Java SE 5.0 after its EOL in October of 2009. They will also have access to any other bug fix releases that Sun provides, such as the upcoming release to support Windows 2008.

Pricing for the Access Only program starts as low as $5,000 (USD) per year for small companies or $2,500 (USD) per year for individual departments and can be purchased via the Sun Online Store.

And what about those companies thinking they want to get extended access to Java plus support? Don't worry, the team's got you covered. We're still offering three levels of support for Java SE for Business: Standard, Premium, and Premium-Plus. 

Full details of the Java SE For Business Program and the new Access-Only feature, are available here.

In conjunction with the Intel announcement today, Sun is announcing details on Solaris and OpenSolaris enhancements for the new Intel Xeon processor 5500 series.

Sun and Intel have been working for over two years to ensure Solaris is optimized to work with the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series.

According to Jim McHugh, Sun VP of Datacenter Software marketing, Sun's Solaris OS is uniquely positioned as the best operating system to leverage the features of the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series and this combination of technologies allows customers to take advantage of scalability, performance, power efficiency and reliability found in no other x86 platform combination.

Sherry Moore offers a developer/system administrator's perspective over on her blog and Scott Davenport talks here about the Fault Management Architecture (FMA) in OpenSolaris, which has been extended to utilize status information from the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series.

For more information including the press release, videos and a Sun News Radio segment visit the online press kit here.

Bookmark http://www.sun.com/launch and tune in on April 14 for more details on Sun's major systems launch and get a sneak peek of the event here. 

Today the world is celebrating the second annual Document Freedom Day. As a community we have a lot to celebrate and recognize.

• It is becoming politically acceptable for organizations everywhere to standardize on OpenDocument Format (ODF) for their documents.
• Microsoft is expected to release information any day now regarding their support of ODF in their latest office suite (and with the ODF plug-in already freely available for their older versions).
  

About the Document Freedom Day

The Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for Document Liberation with roughly 250 active teams worldwide. It is a day of grassroots effort around the world to promote and build awareness for the relevance of Free Document Formats in particular and Open Standards in general.

Document Freedom Day is supported by a large group of organizations and individuals, including, but not limited to ANSOL, Ars Aperta, BrOffice.org, COSS, Esoma, Estándares Abiertos, FFII, Free Knowledge Foundation, Free Software Foundation, Free Software Foundation Europe, Free Software Foundation Latin America, Funambol, Google, IBM, NLnet, ODF Alliance, Open Forum Europe, Open Source Initiative (OSI), Opentia, OSL, iMatix, Red Hat, Sun, The Open Learning Centre. Click here to see a list of DFD Teams.

In addition to being a gold sponsor of EclipseCon this week in Santa Clara, today, Sun is introducing the GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse. Download your copy today

This new bundle provides Eclipse developers with the same easy-to-use, out-of-the-box Java EE developer experience that NetBeans developers have already been leveraging through the GlassFish Plugin for the NetBeans IDE.

Visit Sun at booths 112-113-212-213 in the EclipseCon Exhibit Hall to see the GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse, Project Kenai, JavaFX and more!

GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse includes:

• GlassFish v2 – The open source, enterprise-quality Java EE 5 reference implementation

• GlassFish v3 Prelude – An open source, lightweight, Web 2.0 development and deployment platform

• Eclipse 3.4, Web Tools Platform – The latest IDE release available from the Eclipse Foundation, pre-integrated with the Web Tools Platform, GlassFish v2, GlassFish v3 Prelude.

• GlassFish Eclipse Plugin – Deploy and manage applications from within Eclipse.

• Java SE 6 – The latest, highest performing release of the Java Virtual Machine.

Sun Studio Express 3/09, the official build used for the Sun Studio 12 Update 1 Early Access Program, is now available on Solaris, OpenSolaris and the latest Linux distributions (RHEL/SuSE/Ubuntu/CentOS), feature highlights since the Sun Studio 12 release include:

• C/C++/Fortran compiler optimizations for the latest x86 architectures from Intel and AMD including SSSE3, SSSE4a, SSe4.1, SSE4.2 compiler intrinsics support
• C/C++/Fortran compiler optimizations for the latest UltraSPARC and SPARC64-based architectures
• DLight - New tool to utilize and visualize the power of Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) technology
• dbxTool - New stand-alone GUI debugger
• Full OpenMP 3.0 compilers and tools support
• MPI performance analysis in the Performance Analyzer
• NetBeans IDE 6.5 including new remote development features

Join the Sun Studio 12 Update 1 Early Access Program and evaluate the new capabilities of Sun Studio Software, provide feedback directly to the product team, and influence future product releases.

Check out Kuldip Oberoi's blog or view the Sun Studio 12 Update 1 Early Access Program podcast to learn more.

Download your free copy of Sun Studio

Learn more about the Sun Studio 12 Update 1 Early Access Program

If you weren't at Mobile World Congress, you missed the premiere of JavaFX Mobile. Luckily, bnetTV stopped by the Sun booth to interview Jacob Leherbaum & see the JavaFX demos. Here's the video:

The JavaFX team is heading down to Austin, TX next week for South By Southwest Interactive - March 13-17th. Here's a snapshot of the events and activities we'll be participating in:

• Visit the JavaFX App Lounge on the tradeshow floor (Booth #'s 305/307/404/406) where you can see JavaFX in action on both PCs & mobile devices. You can also come and mingle with the brains behind JavaFX during the SXSW Booth/Pub Crawl, Sunday, March 15, 2009 4pm-6pm
  

• We Like Big Apps: Developing for All the Screens of Your Life, Saturday March 14, 2009, 5pm-6pm, Room 10 Join this vibrant panel of creative Java executives and industry luminaries as they discuss the platforms, tools, tips and tricks that offer distinct advantages for web designers and developers who are seeking to stand out from the crowd.
• Eric Klein, VP of Java marketing at Sun moderates this session featuring:
• Peyton Lindley, executive director of UX design and technology, EffectiveUI;
  
• Bill Maggs, head of developer and partner engagement, Sony Ericsson; 
  
• Nizar Alibhoy, CEO, Telepop

And because it wouldn't be SXSW without parties - you don't want to miss the first ever Fusion Interactive and Film party - sponsored by JavaFX and Whrrl - Monday, March 16, 2009 8pm-10pm @ Red Eye Fly.

If you're going to SXSW you should definitely stop by one of these events & meet the JavaFX team. Hope to see you there! 

It's been a bit over a week since the conclusion of Mobile World Congress 2009, where JavaFX Mobile had its world premier.

During the 4 days of the event, we had reporters, bloggers and industry analysts (as well as customers, partners and show attendees) visiting the booth to check out the JavaFX demos that Sun created for the event.

Sun also had some third-party companies demonstrating their own JavaFX applications in our booth, which was great. And that's how I learned about Canoo Engineering. 

Canoo, is a RIA solution provider based in Basel, Switzerland. For Mobile World Congress, the engineers at Canoo created a JavaFX Mobile-based version of their Music Pinboard application. Here's a photo so you can see what it looks like:

Canoo also has several videos available on their site talking about their experiences with JavaFX. In addition to the Music Pinboard application, another video, discusses how Canoo is able to use the JavaFX Production Suite to help coordinate designer-developer workflow with one of their partners, User Interface Design GmbH, based in Germany.

Head over to the JavaFX site to see more sample applications.