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

Sun is delivering on the commitment it made this year at JavaOne and announcing the availability of the JavaFX Preview release. The JavaFX Preview release provides web scripters, designers and Java developers with a preview of the runtime and tools needed to create amazing Rich Internet Applications (RIA) on the Java platform. Developers can download the JavaFX Preview release, explore the code samples and tutorials, start writing JavaFX applications and provide their feedback to Sun.

JavaFX is the rich client platform for creating RIAs with immersive media and content across all the screens of your life (PC, mobile, TV and other consumer devices).

The JavaFX Preview release consists of the following components:
•    JavaFX Preview SDK: Provides the JavaFX compiler and runtime tools, 2D graphics and media libraries to create highly interactive applications for desktop and browser, as well as tutorials, API documentation and sample code.
•    NetBeans 6.1 IDE with integrated JavaFX plug-in: Provides a sophisticated development environment to build, preview, and debug JavaFX applications.
•    Project Nile: An easy to use tool that exports creative assets from Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator to JavaFX applications.
•    Java Runtime Environment 6 Update 10 Beta: Delivers a high performance runtime with a new browser plug-in that provides the ability to drag a live running applet out of a web browser and dynamically transform it into an application running on the desktop.

Visit the newly created JavaFX blog to stay informed on all of the new developments with the JavaFX platform. Jacob Lehrbaum and Josh Marinacci kicked off the blog today with their entries. In addition, check out the podcast with Jacob for additional commentary.

Download the free JavaFX Preview here.

SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, has just awarded Sun the SWIFTReady Label in the category of Financial Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) for the 10th consecutive year, recognizing Sun's flagship SOA product, Java CAPS. This is no small accomplishment as SWIFT has been raising the bar every year and asking EAI vendors to further adopt the SWIFT standards in an effort to help SWIFT participants achieve better straight-through processing (STP) rates over the SWIFT network.

The SWIFT certification is great news for Sun and for all of our financial services customers, who have seen high-throughput EAI become more and more critical in the SWIFT world. For example, over the years, SWIFT has asked financial institutions to adopt new ISO standards and new security mechanisms. Customers, who are early adopters of financial EAI for SWIFT, have been able to benefit faster from automated adoption of new SWIFTSolutions.

Sun's Java CAPS solution being deployed by SWIFT customers allows out-of-the-box support for real-time interactive message exchange and file transfer — validating data flows in business transactions between back-office applications and SWIFT interfaces deployed at financial institutions and corporations. For banks, fund managers, service bureaus and other SWIFT participants, Java CAPS lowers the barriers to automate financial transactions over the SWIFT network. It dramatically lowers the cost of achieving the benefits of new SWIFTSolutions, such as: SEPA, SCORE, Investment Funds, Cash Management, Exceptions and Investigations and Proxy Voting.

With SWIFT’s announcement of the Alliance Lite and Alliance Integrator projects, it’s raising the bar for Financial EAI once more. Sun is actively working on aligning Java CAPS with SWIFT’s Integrator solution once it will be available to the market.

For more information on Sun's SOA products and the new Java CAPS 6, go here.

For more information on Sun's solutions for the financial services industry, go here.

Sun Managed Operations Achieves ISO 27001 Certification Globally

In February, Sun announced that Sun’s Managed Operations site in the Americas received the prestigious ISO 27001 certification. And now, both Europe and Asia have received their certifications in the Lithgow, Scotland and the Chennai, India offices. This now completes the worldwide process and makes Sun globally compliant as a supplier of secure business protections and standards. These key awards provide a response to security concerns often expressed by Managed Operations customer prospects, making Sun Managed Operations an even more compelling Services solution

ISO 27001 is the internationally recognized Informational Security Management System (ISMS) standard for protecting an organization's information--and that of its customers. ISO 27001:

   * Is the only internationally accepted Security Standard
   * Demonstrates and ensures security best practices, due diligence,
     due care
   * Provides a management approach to business protection including
     risk, governance and compliance

About 4,000 organizations internationally are ISO 27001 certified. More than half are located in Japan and a quarter in Europe. Only about 70 U.S. certifications have been awarded which is indicative of the distinction of the ISO security certification. Among the esteemed organizations which are ISO security certified across the globe are the US Federal Reserve Bank, Tokyo Stock Exchange, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and the United Nations.

For more information about the ISO 27001 certification and Sun Managed Operations, please visit http://www.sun.com/service/managedservices/index.jsp

This one is for all the fans of Sun's directory server technology! Sun is announcing the general availability of the Sun OpenDS Standard Edition 1.0, the world's first commercially available pure Java-based directory server that is based on the technologies developed in the OpenDS community. Sun OpenDS Standard Edition brings to market in one product a standalone and embeddable LDAP v3 compliant directory that is easy to install, use, manage, and extend with a new architecture designed to provide great performance and scalability.

For example, Sun OpenDS SE is capable of running in very low-memory environments, so that all essential directory components can be functional on edge devices, such as: cell phones or PDAs, in addition to scaling to hundreds of millions of entries per instance on appropriately-sized hardware, making effective use of multi-CPU, multi-core machines. Adding in replication capabilities enables the directory server to achieve even higher levels of scalability and fault tolerance for the more demanding deployments.

Main features include:
1) Intuitive administration:
- Easy graphical installation tool that gets your server configured, up and running in less than 3 minutes!
- A nice graphical status panel
- A rich command line tool to perform all online administrative tasks both interactively or scripted
- Multi-master replication (4-way MMR)
- Enhanced LDAP extended operations and controls

2) Security
- Advanced security and password policies in addition to advanced backup and restore capabilities

What's in it for you?
- Simplicity & Compliance: A simple and easy to use LDAP compliant directory server, the LDAPv3 server passes all of the compliance, interoperability and security tests suites.
- Interoperability: Sun OpenDS SE 1.0 implements most of the standard and experimental LDAP extensions defined in the IETF as RFCs or Internet-Drafts, so you'll get maximum interoperability with LDAP client applications.
- Open Source: OpenDS SE is based on open source technology and Sun offers enterprise-level support and indemnification.
- Small Footprint: With only a 16MB installed footprint, the Sun OpenDS Standard Edition 1.0 is an embeddable directory, making it an efficient solution for any Web 2.0 developers, OEMs, ISVs, and SMBs that over time will need to address larger-scale deployment requirements.

To download the latest OpenDS SE 1.0, visit http://wikis.sun.com/display/sunopends

To find more information about Sun's identity management suite, visit http://www.sun.com/identity

The Sun Studio Express 07/08 release is now available. The Sun Studio Express program provides preview builds of C/C++/Fortran Compilers and tools, this latest release contains support for OpenMP 3.0 APIs which offers developers a more general approach to multi-threaded programming with task queuing. This release also integrates with Sun HPC Cluster Tools and provides support for performance analysis of MPI applications. Based on the NetBeans 6.1 IDE, developing parallel applications for the multi-core era has never been easier!

Download your free copy of Sun Studio here.

In addition, check out Kuldip Oberoi and Josh Simons' blogs to find out more information about Sun Studio. 

The National Science Foundation (NSF) will provide $2 million over three years to the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) to fund its GreenLight project. The GreenLight project will connect scientists and their labs to more energy-efficient 'green' computer processing and storage systems using photonics - light over optical fiber.

The NSF infrastructure grant allows UCSD to purchase two Sun Modular Datacenter S20s (Sun MD), one which has already been installed and the second in the third year of the GreenLight project.

The Sun Modular Datacenter currently deployed on the UC San Diego campus will be instrumented for the GreenLight project - offering full-scale processing and storage in order to test how to make computing more energy-efficient. As a modular technology, Sun MD makes it easy for customers to quickly start up new projects like this one or easily scale their datacenter to efficiently take on new work.

The Sun Modular Datacenter is the epitome of 'energy-efficiency'.

Accommodating up to 280 servers with its eco-friendly design, Sun MD can reduce cooling costs by up to 40 percent.

Eliminating the need for air-conditioning , Sun MD's closed-loop water-cooling system uses built-in heat exchanges between equipment racks to channel air flow - allowing the unit to cool 25 kilowatts per rack which is approximately five times the cooling capacity of typical datacenters.

The industry-standard racks can also be placed close together, reducing the overall eco-footprint of the structure and increasing energy efficiency by the elimination of dead space.

To learn more about Sun Modular Datacenter S20, visit: www.sun.com/sunmd.

Sun adds another degree of connection with LinkedIn

LinkedInShowing its continued momentum in the Web 2.0 space, Sun today announced that LinkedIn, the largest professional networking site, has selected a three-year subscription to Sun’s MySQL enterprise database to support the company’s rapid growth. With a network of more than 25 million professionals in more than 170 industries from around the globe and many more joining daily, LinkedIn turned to Sun when it recognized the need to increase the speed and performance of the open source database that powers its public Web site. LinkedIn uses Sun technologies for much of existing IT infrastructure, including the Solaris(TM) 10 Operating System (OS) and Sun SPARC Enterprise servers. The company also tapped Sun for Solaris Everywhere and MySQL professional services to plan and assist with the upgraded MySQL database deployment, which was completed within just two weeks of signing the deal. More information is available below:

Check out more at: http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-07/sunflash.20080728.1.xml 

Last week, Sun went live with 2 significant changes to its North American Channel Program that will better position partners of all sizes to drive growth. Channel partners are critical to Sun’s overall business strategy with the channel driving roughly 70% of Sun’s global revenue.  

According to Sun's Vice President of North American Partner Sales, Tom Wagner, the pathway to growth is through our partners.  Click here to hear Tom discuss the new Partner First and the National Coverage models and why they are so beneficial to partners.

Partner First Sales Model – Sun is moving to a 100% channel-led sales model outside of the company's top 300 named accounts, opening up thousands of accounts for partners.

National Coverage Model – Provides partners with a single window into Sun, a Sun contact that can better focus on their needs and help grow their business on a national scale.

For more information go to www.sun.com/partners

Sun announced today that it will offer enterprise support and indemnification to new and existing customers interested in the technologies available in the OpenSSO Project via a new offering called Sun OpenSSO Express. You can read the press release here and you can download Sun OpenSSO Express here.

What does this mean? It means that OpenSSO is now backed by Sun's support team, giving customers the choice of deploying the latest OpenSSO releases to help address their web access management or federation challenges right away instead of waiting for the next commercial version of the product.

 There's a lot of excitement around this news. Check out the following links:
- Podcast with Michael Cote of Redmonk here.
- An entry by ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn here. 

Other blogs:
- Daniel Raskin: http://blogs.sun.com/raskin/entry/sun_announces_opensso_express
- The Identity Management Buzz Blog: http://blogs.sun.com/idmbuzz/entry/announcing_sun_s_opensso_express
- Michael Teger: http://blogs.sun.com/docteger/entry/here_comes_the_express_opensso
- Rajesh R: http://blogs.sun.com/rajeshr/entry/sun_announces_opensso_express_support
- The Aquarium Blog: http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/entry/opensso_express_sun_support_for

With Joyent, we today announced free Web hosting for Facebook and OpenSocial developers. This is really a good deal as developers get immediate access to a powerful, world-class infrastructure based on Sun and Joyent technologies without having to spend any money until their applications gain momentum. Here is the press release. Here and here are more information on the program. In conjunction with this offer, we will embark on an eight-city tour (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Vancouver, Chicago, Boston, New York and Austin/Dallas) in the U.S. to offer hands-on training to developers who want to write more effective applications that can scale to millions of users.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server has taken the #1 position on the SPECompL2001 benchmark, adding to its list of top benchmarks and world records.

The SPECompL2001 benchmark is an industry-standard test based on 11 high-performance computing applications. It is used to compare the performance of shared memory servers and represents a collection of applications that are used in high-energy physics, weather modeling, computational chemistry, mechanical design, etc. and consists of medium and large problem sets.

On the large problem set, designed for measuring and comparing 8 through 128 processor systems, the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server equipped with 2.52 GHz SPARC64 VII processors delivered a SPECompL2001 result of 1,456,653.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server result beat the IBM p 570 result by 38% and outperformed the SGI Altix 4700 system equipped with the same number of Itanium2 cores, by 45%.

For more information on the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server, go to: www.sun.com/servers.

To learn more about this SPECompL2001 benchmark result and other records that have been set by the Sun SPARC Enterprise family, click here. 

SPEC, SPEComp reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of 07/14/08. Sun results submitted to SPEC. Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 (256 cores, 64 chips, 192/256 OMP threads, 2.52GHz) 1456653 SPECompL2001, 1250890 SPECompLbase2001. IBM POWER5+ p570 (64 cores, 32 chips, 128 OMP threads, 2.3GHz) 1056459 SPECompL2001. SGI Altix 4700 (256 cores, 128 chips, 256 OMP threads, 1.6GHz) 1005076 SPECompL2001.

NBC is planning the most extensive Olympics coverage ever for the Summer Games in Beijing, which kick off on August 8, with 3600 total hours of events. NBC Universal will broadcast many events on its various TV networks, but in addition – thanks in part to Sun - 2200 of those hours will be live events streamed over the web at NBCOlympics.com. In addition, the site will offer more than 3,000 hours of on-demand access to full-event replays and extensive highlights, including daily recaps of key events, best-of montages, commentator analysis and athlete-specific clips. Fans will be able to run up to 20 concurrent streams for 25 Olympic sports.

The site is powered by 160 x64 quad-core Intel Xeon-based Sun Fire X4450 and Sun Fire X4150 servers, which create the energy-efficient, high-availability environment NBC needed to undertake this unprecedented feat of online video streaming. More detail is available in the press release and in this podcast interview with Peter Ryan, Sun EVP of Global Sales and Service.

Another fun aspect of Sun's participation in the Summer Olympics is the creation of a new social networking game which works something like an NCAA basketball tournament bracket. This Facebook application was developed in Sun's new social application environment, Zembly. Fans will be able to access the application either through the Facebook applications catalogue or directly from the NBCOlympics.com website soon.

Peter Eisentraut, a long-time and well-known PostgreSQL developer, is joining Sun's Database Group. With more than eight years of active experience in the PostgreSQL community, Peter will help lead Sun's PostgreSQL engineering team and participate in the development of Sun's PostgreSQL offerings.  Through his deep background in consulting, support and engineering, he will play a direct role in driving the growth of Sun's PostgreSQL business. Peter will also help facilitate Sun's participation in the PostgreSQL community development effort, while maintaining his active role as a member of the PostgreSQL core team.

Many of you probably know Peter from his presentations during many PostgreSQL, Linux and other Open Source conferences. Others who speak German might also know Peter from his multiple publications on PostgreSQL and articles in German Linux magazines. He is engaged throughout the Open Source world, including being a Debian developer and package maintainer. Peter will continue his leadership position in the PostgreSQL community, with which Sun maintains a strong relationship and commitment.

We are very excited to have Peter joining us. Welcome aboard!

JRuby 1.1.3 is the third point release of JRuby 1.1.  The fixes in the release are primarily performance enhancements and compatibility resolutions. 

In an email interview Thomas Enebo states, "Our goal is to put out point releases more frequently for the next several months (about 3-4 weeks a release). We want a more rapid release cycle to better address issues brought up by users of JRuby."

Highlights include:
- RubyGems 1.2
- Greatly improved interpreter performance
- jrubyc compiler usability improvements and bug fixes
- Reduced memory usage and object churn
- Dozens of IO-related and core class RubySpec fixes + reduced memory for IO
- ThreadGroup fixes to resolve Mongrel "dead thread" issues
- New options/properties for tweaking JIT, thread pooling, and more
- Block invocation performance improvements
- Much faster Time performance
- Much better support for --debug
- 82 issues resolved since JRuby 1.1.2

Check out the site and download the code.