Apple Macintosh and x86 developers now have access to greater ease-of-use and performance features available through the Sun Java Studio Creator and the Java technology platform. This latest version of this application development tool also offers multilanguage features with support for Japanese and simplified Chinese.

T-Systems and Vodafone are working with Sun on two separate collaborative deals. T-Systems is partnering with Sun to deploy an enhanced solution for T-Systems' hosting services that supports the SAP NetWeaver platform. While Vodafone has entered into an extensive global framework agreement with consistent terms for Sun's entire hardware, software and services product line.

Each week, we determine which articles have been most frequently referenced by logged-in subscribers to provide you with the most popular articles of the current and last volumes. The top articles for the three most recent issues were:

• 80.3: Sun Alert Notification Warns of Security Hole
• 80.2: "Exploring the JDS Linux Desktop"
• 80.1: UltraSPARC IV+ Processor
  • Access Manager
  • Business Continuity
  • Disaster Recovery
  • Java
  • Linux
  • security
  • Single Sign-On
  • Solaris
  • StarOffice
  • ultrasparc
  (Get More Information . .)

Attempting to lay rumors to rest and direct interested observers to Sun's strategic plans, Sun Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy answered questions posed to him by the Mercury News editorial board. From customer lock-in to a lack of investment in SPARC, McNealy recently addressed these and other issues.

The word of the day is commodity, says Sun President and COO Jonathan Schwartz, and Sun is embracing the business of commodities, competition and the evolution of technology. Schwartz recently discussed his views on these aspects of the market with Computerworld's Rodney Gedda, who described his subject as a true maverick.

With up to four UltraSPARC IV Chip Multithreading (CMT) processors, the Sun Fire V490 server efficiently processes thread-rich workloads delivering up to eight concurrent threads in 32 GB of memory. This server is the lowest cost implementation of Sun's enterprise data center technology and fitting for departmental and enterprise applications.

This executive overview of the Sun Fire V490 and V890 servers focuses on the complexities and costs facing IT environments and the advantages these recently released servers can offer solution-oriented corporations. Sun's Infrastructure solutions, which combines products and services to consolidate IT infrastructure manageability, are highlighted.

NetBeans 4.0 Beta 2 is available for download alone or bundled with Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE) 5.0. J2SE 5.0 offers important new language updates, like metadata, generics, enumerated types and autoboxing of primitive types, and NetBeans IDE 4.0 supports these in its editor, debugger, refactoring and other areas.

A new series of application program interfaces (APIs) that allow component-based solutions from multiple vendors to function together is the next goal of the OSS through Java Initiative (OSS/J). These new APIs -- Pricing, Discovery and Order Management -- were selected because they are instrumental in reducing implementation times and maintenance costs.

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