At the JavaOne 2008 conference this week, Sun “sort of” announced something called Project Hydrazine, Sun’s hinted at answer to Microsoft Live Mesh. I have to wonder how much of Sun’s Project Caroline makes up Project Hydrazine. Not much detail squeaked out about Project Hydrazine other than to say it “includes common federated services for discovery, personalization, deployment, location, and development”. Most of the emphasis was put on JavaFX, Sun’s competitor to Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe AIR visually interactive technologies.
You have to give Sun a lot of credit. Microsoft and Google may get more than their share of media and public attention about web 2.0 and cloud services, but Sun’s not giving in on their Java foothold. Java and Apache are still the dominate delivery platform for web apps. Sun’s added MySQL to the fold, and announced their own virtualization product built on Xen. JavaFX, Hydrazine and Caroline may seem like reactive efforts to Google, Microsoft and other industry titans but Sun has their own vision of pulling software into the services cloud. If played right, Sun can strongly influence the future of existing and new web 2.0 apps.
Given the momentum with Java technologies, Sun can still play a pivotal role in shaping the direction of software applications and future cloud services, but these initiatives have to bear fruits relatively soon. Microsoft, Google, Salesforce and Amazon are dominating the public thought leadership shaping how the industry views SaaS and PaaS offerings. Microsoft is uniquely push the data synchronization idea, which I think is also a crucial part of the equation.
Related Link: Get Ready For XaaS Everywhere
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