Project Hydrazine is billed as a "turnkey hosted solution allowing developers to leverage the Sun platform to create applications and services and monetize them without going anywhere else." Darryl K. Taft of eWeek interviews Bob Brewin, Sun distinguished engineer and CTO for software, about this current Sun venture.

Brewin define the composition of Project Hydrazine as "...a network environment, a data center and other infrastructure components such as Sun's JavaFX rich Internet application technology, Sun's GlassFish application server, the Sun enterprise service bus, the Sun directory server, MySQL, 'cheap storage' and Sun hardware."

In addition, two repositories will be part of the package. These will enable the storage of services that run on the cloud and of metadata to be used and reused in creating applications. Furthermore, Sun will include Project Insight, an analytics capability, that will enable developers to monitor the users of their projects and to monetize them, according to Brewin.

"Sitting on the side of this will be a developer environment and developer hosting services. ... We want to make it as easy as possible for developers and designers to create and leverage applications," Brewin said, noting that developers will likely use the services differently than designers. "A designer might take existing services and combine them in unique ways to create mashups," he said.

Taft sees Project Hydrazine as pitting Sun against Microsoft's Live Mesh strategy, another cloud computing and sync mechanism solution, as well as in the areas of developer and design tools space and in the concept of developer-designer workflow. Brewin sees the JavaFX Transformer technology as having a significant role in this area. Java FX Script will do for the Sun solution what XAML does for Microsoft's product.

Even so, Brewin voiced a note of deliberation on the question of design tools, suggesting that Sun would not immediately deliver any solution as specifically targeted to designers as Photoshop, for example. Rather, he suggested a more likely path would be to work with someone like Adobe on the development of extended designer capabilities.

One view of this possibility among customers was that of Michael Coté, an analyst with RedMonk, who said, "It's a long row to hoe for them or anyone else, like Microsoft. The fact that Sun is integrating with the Adobe design tool chain instead of going it completely on their own was a good surprise for me to hear about. More importantly, I'm hoping it's indicative of Sun's general plan for building out the developer-designer tool chain: pulling together the good parts no matter where they come from instead of building their own stack, top to bottom."

Brewin added that Project Hydrazine would also support such clouds as Google App Engine, Amazon EC2 and services from such vendors as eBay and PayPal. Sun plans to deliver an early access release of its JavaFX SDK (software development kit) in July, Taft concludes. [...read more...]

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