Awards for Sun Microsystems in Developer.com Product of the Year competition

Issued by Sun Microsystems
Johannesburg, 11 Mar 2004

Several of Sun Microsystems' key development technologies have earned awards in Developer.com's annual Product of the Year Awards.

Products and technologies taking top honours from among hundreds of nominations included Java Studio, the NetBeans platform, the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME) Wireless Toolkit 2.1 and Java Card technology.

"These awards are further evidence of the growing strength and breadth of Sun's developer product line, from tools for wireless development to enterprise deployment," says Sean O'Hare, Java Systems Engineer at Sun Microsystems SA.

"Java technology and the NetBeans platform serve as the foundation of our tools strategy. As such we are pleased that Developer.com has singled them out for these accolades," he adds.

Sun Java Studio tied with Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET for Development Tool of the Year. Declaring the tie, Developer.com judges noted the votes were just too close to call.

The NetBeans platform and Java Card technology were cited with just four other technologies as Technology of the Year finalists, while J2ME Wireless Toolkit 2.1 was awarded the top honour in the Wireless Development Product of the Year category. NetBeans IDE 3.5.1 also took the top honour for Java Tool/Add In of the Year and was selected as a finalist for Open Source Tool of the Year.

"The NetBeans platform is the foundation for Sun's developer tools strategy and the Sun Java Studio products. The platform is written entirely in the Java language, ensuring inherent multiplatform support, including the Solaris Operating System, Windows, Linux and Macintosh platforms," explains O'Hare.

Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and Sun Java Studio were finalists in the Enterprise Development Tool of the Year category, which was a distinct category from Development Tool of the Year.

For more information on Sun technologies, please visit www.sun.com/products/. For more information on the NetBeans open source project, visit www.netbeans.org.

Sun Microsystems, Inc

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://www.sun.com.

Developer.com Product of the Year Awards

The Developer.com Product of the Year Awards were designed to recognise the technologies and products that significantly influence the work done by programmers. Hundreds of products were nominated last fall. The nominations were narrowed for final voting by readers, which took place in December 2003 to determine the winners within each category. Developer.com is a property of Jupitermedia (Nasdaq: JUPM). For more information, visit www.developer.com.