In a further demonstration of its commitment to open architecture, Sun Microsystems is providing the open source community with a new developer Web portal that centralises critical information.
The company has announced SunSource.net, offering yet another tool for open source developers to engage with Sun on co-development efforts. Sun's rapidly growing open source efforts include five Sun-sponsored community projects that total more than 8 million lines of source code.
According to Lodewyk de Beer, enterprise architect at Sun Microsystems SA, creating a smart Web service can be very time-consuming considering the process of defining, developing, deploying and managing that service.
"SunSource.Net goes a long way to reducing the time it takes to create that service by sharing knowledge at the definition and deployment stages. This is especially important in SA where core developers are increasingly dependent on 'guru mailing lists' for development support. SunSource.Net is an excellent way to provide specialised and focused interaction for our technology hungry developer community," says De Beer.
Sun has made a serious commitment to open source software development over the last two years, including the single largest contribution to date through OpenOffice.org, the site that hosts the StarOffice source code. The benefits of developing software based on open source are well defined and well known throughout the community - shared development, shared debugging, shared support, and most importantly, no vendor lock-in or monopoly.
"Unlike our competitors, Sun is actually contributing real code to the open source community," adds De Beer. "Open source software development is a core part of Sun's strategy. It's a model that has value for both Sun and for developers. And with SunSource.net, developers now have one focused resource through which to directly engage Sun in conversations regarding all our open source projects."
SunSource.net is a one-stop access point for developers, featuring links to all of Sun's free and open source projects, including Sun-sponsored projects (Netbeans.org, OpenOffice.org, Jxta.org, Brazil, and Java Reliable Multicast Service) and community projects Sun is contributing to or sponsoring (Apache-based projects, such as Ant, Batik, Crimson, Struts and Tomcat; and other projects, such as GNOME, Mozilla, TI-RPC for NFSv4, NFS v4 on Linux, Solaris X Internationalisation Framework).
Developers also have access to mailing lists to begin conversations with developers inside Sun and also with members throughout the global open source community regarding Sun's policies and involvement with open source and about open source in general.
CollabNet, a leading provider of collaborative software development solutions based on open source concepts, has been contracted by Sun to provide the infrastructure for SunSource.net, which follows three other community sites that Sun and CollabNet have built in the last year, including Jxta.org, Netbeans.org, and OpenOffice.org.
For SunSource.net, Sun worked with CollabNet to port its SourceCast platform to Solaris 8, rated the number one Unix operating environment by DH Brown Associates for reliability, availability, serviceability and security, and a powerful platform for collaborative, open source software development projects. CollabNet will continue to offer SourceCast on the Solaris Operating Environment as an optional platform for its customers.
The CollabNet SourceCast platform provides a comprehensive Web-based development environment that enables geographically dispersed groups of developers to collaborate on software projects.
SourceCast tools for revision controls issue tracking, mailing list creation and management, Web-based administration as well as custom branding and content. In addition, SourceCast provides the flexibility and security needed to support both proprietary and open source software development projects.
"The SunSource site provides developers with a single location from where they can easily link to all of Sun's Open Source Networks said Brian Behlendorf, co-founder and CTO of CollabNet.
"Since CollabNet is providing our SourceCast platform for all of Sun's major open source initiatives, developers can use the same tools to work on any of the projects. In addition, SourceCast on Solaris allows CollabNet to offer customers an additional platform option to help meet their business requirements."
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