Officials at Sun Microsystems announced updates to the company’s
developer platform and 64-bit computing at its Tech Days Conference in New
York Tuesday.
Up first were beta versions of its IDEs
Studio 10 (JS 10) and Java Studio Enterprise 7 (JSE 7), which the company said are available today.
One of the biggest features of JS 10, outside of debugging and GUI
with support for the C, C++ and FORTRAN programming languages. The full release
is due later this year.
JSE 7, the full release of which is due sometime next year, includes
full UML support
collaboration for distributed programming teams and an application
profiler to monitor and correct performance-related glitches in Java
code.
Java architects have been somewhat skeptical about the inclusion of UML in JSE 7,
but Jeff Jackson, Sun Java tools and platforms vice president, said its
inclusion is worthwhile.
“My approach, always, as the engineering guy is to take a practical view of
how developers work and try and get their input,” he said in a press
conference Tuesday. “Yes, there’s a lot of skepticism, so we have in the
beta the practical approach of using UML with J2EE developers and getting some
real useful feedback and getting that incorporated in the product. So far, the
early feedback is quite positive.”
Joe Keller, Sun vice president of Java Web services and development
platforms marketing, also announced a Java Virtual Machine
64-bit computing Opteron to be wrapped up with Sun’s
forthcoming release
of Solaris 10
operating system.
Solaris 10 will also include full support of J2SE 5.0
when it’s released later this year, though Keller wouldn’t elaborate on the timetable.
Beta versions for the SPARC
To complement the Solaris 10 release, Sun announced the
Solaris 10 Developer Connection Web site, which features tutorials, tips and other
documentation for developers to download.
The source code for Solaris 10 won’t be available until several months after
the release, which is a timetable similar to the source code release
of J2SE 5.0 Friday.
Sun has been working with AMD
to make some headway against IBM’s and Intel’s
collaboration on enterprise computing, and 64-bit computing
specifically, for nearly a year.
Keller refutes the reports that Intel-based machines on the Windows platform
are cutting into the Unix market.
“I don’t believe that’s happening,” he said. “I believe Unix is showing an increasing
share and Sun is also increasing its share at the low end in terms of
delivering Unix-based servers. We’ve improved market share the
past couple quarters and in fact, we’re the ones who started this move off
of supercomputers onto lower-priced systems that are ganged together.”
Margaret Lewis, AMD director of software strategy, agrees with that
assessment and predicts even more market share when Solaris 10 is released.
“Everybody over here understands the value of 64-bit computing, and people
like Sun have taken their Unix platforms to 64-bit computing back in the
mid-90s,” she said. “With Solaris 10 having support for AMD’s Opteron
64-bit, you have a very tried, true, tested Unix operating system that can
run either on a SPARC or Opteron platform.
“We’re seeing customers that want
the flexibility to have a variety of systems and operating systems,” she continued, “and I
think Sun is really stepping up to the plate.”
