Sun’s New Project Caroline Hosting Platform

The big announcement from Sun Microsystems this week is the background on its new Internet hosting platform project, dubbed Project Caroline. The project is a research and development vehicle that will potentially provide the hosting for various SaaS providers. Sun was in the news earlier this year with its acquisition of Open Source server application MySql, a possible prelude to this announcement.

Sun plans to reveal the details of Project Caroline and several other projects at its Sun Labs Open House. The target user for the project are small to medium SaaS (Software as a Service) providers. The project is slated to provide a plethora of computer resources, including networking and storage.

From the Project Caroline web site: "Anticipating needs driven by new SaaS business models and processes, Project Caroline helps SaaS providers develop services rapidly using high-level programming languages like the Java programming language, Ruby, Python, and Perl to update in-production services frequently and to automatically flex their use of platform resources to match changing runtime demands."

Project Caroline seems to be designed as more of a backbone than anything else, allowing SaaS providers to build on it in modules. Adding features the emerging SaaS providers need, as they need then is a more customizable and a la carte method of supporting business. This modular approach offers streamlining opportunities that wouldn't normally be so readily available to new businesses.

Sun will also be announcing other projects at the Open House. Some of these include the new royalty free media system OMS, Lively Kernel web programming project, Project Live software distribution system, 3-D world building for business and education with Project Wonderland, Project Darkstar to serve games, and Project MRTLE. MRTLE stands for Mixed Reality Teaching and Learning Environment.