At the JavaOne conference, Sun Microsystems unveiled new open source initiatives designed to keep itself and Java relevant in the emerging service-oriented architecture space.

Amidst a 10th birthday for Java featuring a ragtime band and a ukelele-wielding mascot, Sun threw its weight behind open software development by releasing code for the popular Java System Application Server Platform Edition 9.0 and Java System Enterprise Server Bus, which is based on the Java Business Integration (JBI) specification (JSR 208), plus new SOA tools.

Sun CEO Scott McNealy stressed that Sun doesn't make money by selling Java as a language, but rather by coming up with commercial uses for Java. In the SOA space he made no bones about Java and Microsoft's .NET platform being in a foot race.

"If we don't go out and make these open source communities, we stand a chance of losing customers to .NET," McNealy said during a late morning press conference.

Sun president Jonathan Schwartz agreed that the new open source drive was critical to keeping Java relevant in a shifting IT landscape. Yet, based on 10 years of experience with Java, he expressed confidence that Sun's open source play in the enterprise-class application server and integration markets would net real gains.

"Java's been the most open and vibrant community the IT industry has ever seen," he said during his morning keynote. "There is no downside to free and open source software."

Read Open source application server and integration tools central to Sun's SOA strategy

The name of the java.net project for Sun's App Server is Project GlassFish.

You can find it here:

http://glassfish.dev.java.net/


The source is already up, and under the CDDL license. Check it out.

"Sun Open-Sources More J2EE Tech"
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1831698,00.asp

or (just in case that link gets whacked): http://tinyurl.com/e4p63

Sun can't seem to get a break coming or going. First, everyone says that they should open source more, and when they do they get beat up on for being a "me too".

I've used (and seen used) the current version of Sun's app server, and it's a decent piece of software. Sure, it's just one of many open source app servers (including Tomcat, JBoss, Resin, Jetty, Jonas) but that shouldn't be a reason to beat Sun up for open sourcing it.

Peace,

Cameron Purdy
Tangosol Coherence: Clustered Shared Memory for Java