Sun Microsystems Inc and its Middle East Java projects solutions provider, InterBit Training & Consulting Ltd, have won a contract to set up a Java-based virtual community which will link together 20 Turkish universities. The project is scheduled to start this month, and is expected to last between four and five years. A budget of $1m per year is being provided by a body which reports to the Turkish Ministry of Education. InterBit, headquartered in Ramat Gan, Israel, has been developing Java applications for Sun since its inception two and a half years ago. Its role in this project, says Interbit general manager, Eedo Lifshitz, will be to design the infrastructure in Java for this virtual community, which aims to enable information and software sharing by the universities. Virtual community members will have access to an electronic library and to centralized databanks of freeware, including reusable bits of Java code. InterBit intends to design the architecture to facilitate easy addition of new information and shareware. Sun is to provide the hardware to support the system, which includes Sun servers and 300 network computers.
