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Sun releases Solaris upgrade with bundled app server

Sun Microsystems has officially released a version of its Solaris operating system that features a bundled application server and runs on Intel x86 hardware.

Solaris 9 12/02 is an incremental update to Sun's Unix OS. Inclusion of the Java-based application server, the Platform Edition of Sun ONE (Open Net Environment) Application Server 7, in Solaris was formally announced in May 2002. However, initial plans to do so caused a momentary selling off of stock in BEA Systems, which thrives on selling Java application servers for Sun systems.

A Sun official said there were no hard feelings between the two companies regarding Sun's application server bundling.

Solaris' product line manager for Solaris, Bill Moffitt, said: "Our reason for doing this is to widen the adoption of the J2EE platform. By putting this into Solaris 9, we ensure that every copy of Solaris 9 going out has an application server built into it so people can build and deploy J2EE applications.

"At the same time, we make sure [BEA] WebLogic Server 7 is included in the media kit with Solaris, which means people who prefer can simply take out and install the BEA application server."

Moffitt said the BEA product only came with a six-month trial license while the Sun offering had no such time limit. Still, Sun's application server was for single-machine, smaller application deployments, not enterprise-level applications that required functions such as load-balancing and horizontal scaling.

"What the [BEA] executives I spoke to said was they supported the idea of making the J2EE platform as ubiquitous as possible," Moffitt said. "They don't see the Sun ONE Application Server as being that much competition to them. Their market share is much greater than ours."