Despite Sun Microsystems Inc’s attempts to downplay the significance of the announcement it’s making today at Internet World in New York City the company appears to be starting to cut the ground from under its buddy Netscape Communications Corp by giving away its new WebServer software and integrating it into a new cut of the Solaris operating system. Ominously Sun last week removed Netscape product information from the Solstice pages of its web site where the web server software had been advertised. WebServer is the software codenamed Vishnu that Sun was preparing to announce a few months back until it realized it didn’t really have much of anything to call a product as such and in any case hadn’t worked out its positioning sufficiently. Initially WebServer will replace the NCSA Mosaic HTTP daemon that is used to deliver administration services on Sun’s Netra internet servers. The hardware unit bundles Netscape’s various server offerings for creating and delivering web content with the systems and says it has no plan to change that strategy. However if all Sun is doing it is to is replace the Mosaic server – which is already free – then it’s taken a long time to simply re-invent the wheel. It plans to extend the WebServer technology in phases throughout next year and is already claiming that it’s almost twice as fast as competitors’ products. It says Webserver is designed for corporations, government, higher education and ISPs and will handle large numbers of internet and intranet users. Doesn’t sound quite like just a lightweight HTTP daemon replacement. The company will also announce today that it’s got an early access version of Solstice WorkShop, its Java-based Internet management toolkit that combines the Java management API with Java WorkShop development tools. And Sun’s releasing a beta version of its Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler and a JIT Validation suite, that tests newly-compiled applets and applications.
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