Sun Microsystems, Inc. has used Java technology gained through its Tarantella acquisition to produce a new portal server software product for Windows and other environments, previewed for customers and journalists during this week's launch of new Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 hardware servers in New York City.

Geared to delivering applications across multiplatform desktop and mobile environments, Sun's upcoming Java System Portal Server 7 software will run apps developed for Microsoft Windows 2000, 2003, and XP — along with those built for Sun Solaris, Red Hat Linux, and HP-UX platforms — on top of either Solaris or Red Hat.

In its new portal server and other products and services, Sun is exploiting Tarantella's Java container technology to help smooth incompatibilities between Java apps originating in different operating environments, said Don Grantham, executive vice president of Sun Services, in a meeting with DevSource at the full-day event in New York.

For some time now, Sun has also placed non-Java-enabled Solaris containers, or wrappers, around Java apps from other OS in order to help run them on Solaris, according to Mike Splain, chief technologist in Sun's Scalable Systems Group. Binary compatibility across different Java environments has given no guarantee of smooth sailing on Solaris, Splain maintained, in another meeting with DevSource. "Although some of these Java apps would run [on Solaris], not all of them could," Splain added. Without container technology, Java apps created in Red Hat Linux, for instance, would need to be recompiled by developers each time either Sun or Red Hat issued a new OS release.

Also this week, Sun announced the availability of Solaris Containers for Linux Applications, a second generation of container technology first produced through the company's earlier Project Janus.

Meanwhile, for its part, Sun's still unannounced Java portal server will support JAX (Java API for XML), a new specification for writing portable and interoperable) SOAP applications in Java, as well as JSR (Java Specification Request) 168, an emerging protocol for Java-enabled portals.

The Java server also features a dynamic rendering engine for delivering content to PCs and PDAs regardless of developer's mark-up language. Supported mark-up languages include HTML, WML (Wireless Mark-up Language), cHTML (Compact HTML), xHTML (Extensible HTML), and HDML (Handheld Device Mark-up Language).

Also built-in are portlets for SAP, Oracle/PeopleSoft, and Siebel enterprise applications, along with SSO (single sign-on), for identity-based application access.

The portal server is slated for official rollout next week, according to sources at Sun. Demonstated at a product expo during this week's hardware launch, it also received a brief mention this week in Sun's press materials for Fire T1000 and T2000, which referred to the Java-based software as one of the platforms used in benchmarking the new RISC-based servers.

Sun's portal software will run on a choice of either x86-based PC hardware or RISC-based Sun SPARC server.

In another interview at the press event, Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata, predicted that Sun's new high-end T1000 and T2000 SPARC hardware will pose strong competition to Intel- and AMD-based PC servers running Windows or Linux, for example. As strengths, Haff cited the new servers' high performance, small size, low price points, economical power consumption, and 32-thread processing support. Beyond letting developers built applications creating greater numbers of processes, this extensive multithreading will help to speed development time, according to the analyst.

The T1000 and T2000 servers will also use Java containers for running non-Solaris applications, according to Sun's Splain. But, he acknowledged, non-Solaris-based Java apps won't reach the same levels of multithreading support as Solaris apps unless the other OS are ported to Solaris in full native mode.

Since acquiring Tarantella, Sun has also been using the ISV's technology within Secure Global Desktop, a rebranded edition of Tarantella's original product of the same name.

Sun Secure Global Desktop runs on hardware servers that include Red Hat, Novell SuSE, and Fedora distributions of Linux, along with both the SPARC and x86 editions of Solaris.

The product supports Java-enabled desktop clients such as Windows, Macintosh, Java Desktop System, and Linux, in addition to PDA clients. Supported "application types" include Windows, Java, HTML, Linux, and IBM mainframe and AS/400.

Sun's Java-based Secure Global Desktop also supports a number of Microsoft-specific technologies, including RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol} for remote access and Active Directory and Windows Domains for security.

Meanwhile, Sun has also started to deploy Tarantella's container-based Java technology within its services arm. Sun Services now uses the Java technology for remote management of customer environments such as Windows, Linux, and Unix, for instance, said Brian Winter, Sun's vice president of Services Marketing, in another interview at the New York City event.