Oracle shutting off Sun project-hosting site

Oracle shutting off Sun project-hosting site

Project Kenai will still be used internally, but external users must move elsewhere as Oracle consolidates hosting sites

In the wake of its merger with Sun Microsystems, Oracle is discontinuing access to Project Kenai, which was developed by Sun as an open source project-hosting site.

Kenai, Oracle said in an updated FAQ statement for developers on Tuesday, will be discontinued for public use. "Oracle will continue to use it internally and look for ways that our customers can take advantage of it," the Oracle FAQ said.

[InfoWorld’s Paul Krill reported last week that Oracle canceled plans for the Sun Cloud public cloud service announced by Sun last year. ]

The phasing-out is being done to consolidate project-hosting, according to the Project Kenai Team in a Web posting about the future of Kenai. "Minimizing the number of current project-hosting sites is a start in this direction," the team said.

At the Kenai beta site, users were advised to being migrating repositories and content to other locations.

"The complete shutdown of the site and the removal of the domain will be completed in the next 60 days (April 2nd 2010). This should provide ample time for all projects to be moved to a new home of the project owners choice," the Kenai team said.

"Any projects that remain after the 60 day limit (April 2nd 2010), will be removed when the site is turned off," the team said..

"While it has come time to close the domain of Kenai.com, the infrastructure, which is already used under Netbeans.org, will live on to support other domains in the future," the team said.

Oracle also lauded in the FAQ the combination of the OTN (Oracle Technology Network), the Sun BigAdmin system administration portal, and the Sun Developer Network, which includes the java.sun.com Web site.

This combination will "result in the largest and most diverse community of developers, database administrators, sysadmins, and architects," Oracle said.

For the near future, Sun Developer Network and BigAdmin will remain in current forms, Oracle said. The company foresees an integration of these sites into a redesigned and re-architected OTN.

Also, Oracle plans to continue to offer certifications for Sun technologies including Java, SPARC, Solaris, and MySQL as part of the Oracle University program.

Oracle one week ago today detailed ambitious plans for its newly acquired Sun technologies.

This story, "Oracle shutting off Sun project-hosting site," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest news in software development at InfoWorld.com.

By Paul Krill | InfoWorld

VMware to Buy Zimbra From Yahoo In Cloud Computing Play

VMware to Buy Zimbra From Yahoo In Cloud Computing Play.

VMware said it planned to purchase Zimbra from Yahoo, a move that gives the virtualization leader a strong, cloud-based, open-source collaboration suite with which it could attack rival Microsoft's Outlook and Exchange e-mail applications.

Financial details of the acquisition were not released. However, several speculations over the past week or so estimated the price to be about $100 million, much lower than the $350 million Yahoo paid when it bought Zimbra in 2007.

Zimbra is the developer of the open-source Zimbra Collaboration Suite, which includes applications to coordinate, manage, and share e-mails from multiple vendors, including Microsoft's Outlook, in a single interface; perform group scheduling; and handle desktop and mobile device synchronization.

The company currently serves 55 million mailboxes, with overall mailbox growth of 86 percent and SMB mailbox growth of 165 percent in 2009, VMware said.

The acquisition, once it closes, would be the second open-source acquisition for VMware.

The company in August acquired SpringSource, a developer of applications based on open-source technologies and a leader in such open-source communities as the enterprise Java programming model Spring Framework, the Apache Tomcat Java application server environment, and the Groovy and Grails dynamic language and Web application framework.

In a blog post on the acquisition, VMware CTO Steve Herrod wrote that Zimbra will help VMware enhance its cloud computing offerings in two ways.

First, Herrod wrote, it will help VMware simplify IT. Zimbra is the most popular software for developing virtual appliances, Herrod wrote. "Once deployed onto VMware vSphere, the Zimbra virtual appliance will automatically benefit from the built-in VMware vSphere scalability, availability, and security services," he wrote.

The acquisition also lets VMware expand on its vCloud cloud computing technology and SpringSource platform-as-a-service capabilities by adding an integrated portfolio of applications, giving VMware a software-as-a-service offering.

The Zimbra Collaboration Suite also competes in some ways with some of arch rival Microsoft's key products, including Office, giving VMware another tool for competing with Microsoft.

However, Herrod wrote in his blog, VMware does not want to alienate Microsoft Office users from working with VMware's vSphere virtualization technology, which competes with Microsoft's Hyper-V 

"VMware vSphere is and will continue to be an outstanding platform for the deployment of Microsoft Exchange. We have heavily optimized our virtualization offerings specifically for the deployment of Microsoft Exchange, and thousands of companies are benefiting from the increased flexibility, availability, and security that comes from running Microsoft Exchange on top of VMware vSphere," he wrote.

VMware brings the opportunity to become more involved in cloud computing, wrote Jim Morrisroe, Vice President, Sales for Zimbra, in a blog on the acquisition.

"Private and/or public cloud computing networks can work together and applications can be deployed and managed seamlessly across those clouds. Zimbra products were designed from the ground up with virtualization and the cloud in mind, with a modular architecture and APIs to allow distributed access to data and storage," Morrisroe wrote. "Email and collaboration services have always been ubiquitous to organizations, but now the barriers to transitioning them to efficient virtualized environments will be much more seamless."

On CRN.In, By Joseph F Kovar, ChannelWeb, January 13, 2010

Synergetics is Awarded as the "Best. NET Training Service Provider" by Microsoft.

First showing of Silverlight 4 for developers at PDC

LOS ANGELES – Silverlight 4 broke out today at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference. Developers can now access local resources, including hardware, Windows 7 APIs and Component Object Model applications.

Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform, detailed Silverlight 4 features, which target three key areas: expanding beyond the browser, displaying rich media and supporting business applications.

Silverlight 3 introduced a secure sandbox mode that allowed applications to be run on the desktop for Mac OS X and Windows. Silverlight 4 goes further with a trusted mode that opens the sandbox so that applications can access it, Guthrie said.

On Windows, applications may read and write to the file system, access hardware devices, integrate with Windows 7 APIs (such as location), and integrate with COM components.

COM access gives developers the opportunity to access millions of Visual Basic, Win32 and custom .NET applications, said Forrester principal analyst Jeffrey Hammond. COM access is fine from a security perspective, provided it is turned off by default and requires consent, he added.

Those capabilities compare favorably to Adobe’s AIR platform for desktop-enabled rich Internet applications, Hammond said. Beyond the desktop, access to local hardware contributes to Silverlight's media experience.

Silverlight applications can now access webcams with client-side input access. Transformation encoding happens on the client-side. Guthrie demonstrated an application that morphed his picture, and he uploaded it to his Twitter profile.

Another application scanned a barcode and invoked a Web service to compare product prices at online retailers.

Microsoft has added smooth streaming for video playback. The bitrate is automatically adjusted as processor and network conditions change, Guthrie explained. He also previewed video streaming to an iPhone.

There’s also an assortment of new controls and capabilities for business users. Silverlight applications can now print, as well as read from the clipboard; the platform now supports drag-and-drop and accepts mouse-wheel input.

Another highlight was an embedded HTML hosting control. Guthrie demonstrated Flash video being played within a Silverlight application.

At the lower level, Silverlight 4 includes UDP multicast for peer-to-peer scenarios, REST enhancements via ADO.NET data services, and Windows Communication Foundation RIA services that enables access to data for queries, changes and custom operations.

Microsoft also tweaked Silverlight’s performance by added JIT optimizations in the Common Language Runtime compiler for Silverlight, Guthrie said. “It’s almost twice as fast for processor-intensive things.”

Assemblies are shared between Silverlight 4 and .NET 4, and Microsoft will ship a WYSIWYG design surface with Visual Studio 2010. Microsoft is also adding code completion for data binding expressions.

Beta 1 of Silverlight 4 is available for download. A new plug-in has been developed for Google's Chrome browser. Silverlight 4 should be finished in the first half of 2010, Guthrie said.

Internet Explorer 9 was also previewed at PDC. Microsoft is focusing on improving standards support, graphics and JavaScript performance, Guthrie said. CSS 3 and HTML 5 are standards that Microsoft will be incorporating into the browser.

In an effort to distinguish the IE user experience, IE 9’s rendering engine provides hardware-accelerated GDI drawing that is made possible through DirectX APIs. “Hardware shines through on the browser even with standards-based rendering,” Guthrie said.

On Sdtimes, First showing of Silverlight 4 for developers at PDC, By David Worthington, November 18, 2009 

What is Silverlight?

Silverlight is a lightweight cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in designed to create rich internet applications which is freely available for download. It enables developers to create Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and is a competitor to other RIA platforms like Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, Google Gears, JavaFX and so on. Till date, there have been two ‘major’ Silverlight releases by Microsoft: Silverlight 1.0, and Silverlight 2.0.