Microsoft Live Mesh to get more competition -- from Sun
At the opening day of JavaOne on May 6, Sun officials began laying out their vision for a future cloud-computing platform, code-named Hydrazine, that Sun plans to field against competitive offerings from Microsoft, Google, Amazon and others.
Robert Brewin, Sun Chief Technology Officer and Distinguished Engineer, described Hydrazine to me as a combination of Amazon's Elastic Cloud, Microsoft's Live Mesh and Google Analytics all rolled into one. It's a platform that Sun is building on top of JavaFX, which is Sun's rough equivalent to Adobe AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight. Sun announced JavaFX a year ago.
(Hydrazine, by the way, is a "toxic and volatile rocket fuel.")
The architectural diagrams Sun showed looked very similar to the ones Microsoft showed off a couple of weeks ago when rolling out its Live Mesh vision. Live Mesh (formerly known as "Horizon") is Microsoft's synchronization and collaboration platform.
Like Microsoft is doing with Mesh, Sun is building a set of common services -- discovery, personalization, deployment, location, content delivery and developer -- which developers will be able to take advantage of when building Java EE and SE applications. On top of these lower-level services will be other common building blocks: Advertising, market place, developer hosting and repository services, according to Sun.
Hydrazine also is about "content developers (being able to) collaborate and share with Java developers," Brewin said during a keynote presentation at JavaOne on Tuesday.
Brewin mentioned JavaFX Transformer, plug-ins that the company is building to allow designers to use their favorite tools, like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, to traditional development tools. Sun also is working on JavaFX Script, a new scripting language that will do for Java developers what FlexBuilder and Expression Blend are for Adobe and Microsoft developers, respectively.
Microsoft, for its part, has said relatively little so far about the tools and services that it is going to provide for developers interested in building Live Mesh applications. Microsoft still hasn't delivered its expected Live Mesh software development kit (SDK), which will allow third-party products to use Live Mesh member services, build on top of the Live Desktop and plug into the Live Mesh news feed system to generate notifications about activities.
Microsoft also is said to be building its own equivalent to Elastic Cloud and Google's App Engine services. One component of Microsoft's hosted developer platform is SQL Server Data Services (SSDS), which the company unveiled earlier this year at Microsoft Mix '08. But Microsoft has other pieces of a hosted developer service up its sleeve, as part of a still-unannounced hosted developer platform that is code-named "Zurich," sources have told me.
Hydrazine, like Microsoft's Live Mesh, is more vision than reality at this point. Microsoft did deliver an early technology preview of Live Mesh last month, which is currently being tested by thousands inside and outside the company to synchronize their Windows PC files. The cross-platform, cross-device capabilities Microsoft is promising to deliver as part of Live Mesh are still at least a couple of months away. And the Live Mesh SDK isn't expected to debut much before October, at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference.