ENGINEERING

PALO ALTO, CA -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) has announced a new release of the Forte(TM) Developer suite of products, an integrated set of development tools designed for building enterprise applications. The upgrade features new debugging and compiling capabilities that enable programmers to debug mixed Java(TM) language and native C, C++, and Fortran code on the Solaris(TM)8 Operating Environment (OE). Forte Developer now allows customers to more quickly migrate applications to Solaris and significantly improves the compatibility between Solaris and Linux development environments. "Enterprise developers will immediately be more productive by using the updated Forte Developer," said Mark Herring, director of marketing, Forte Tools, Sun Microsystems. "For the first time, developers can use a single tool to efficiently debug enterprise-wide, multi-language applications, which dramatically increases the quality of the code and reduces the time-consuming process of debugging with multiple tools." The new debugging capability is based on an extension to the dbx debugger, an interactive, source-level, graphical and command-line tool, that now accepts the GNU debugger (gdb) commands. The extension employs the JVMDI (Java VM Debugging Interface) to implement a native debugging agent running on a Java Virtual Machine. Developers using Java with C /C++/Fortran to build applications for the Solaris OE now have a single tool to debug their entire application. The compilers in Forte Developer have also been updated to accept more GNU C++ syntax, which reduces the need to re-write source code. "Sun's Forte tools are an indispensable part of our programming environment, which involves complex, multi-vendor, multi-platform, multi-language computing and demands cross-platform debugging and porting tools tightly integrated with the Solaris OE," said Prof. Christian Bischof, head of the Computing and Communication Center at the University of Technology Aachen in Germany. "Of particular importance are Sun's Forte for High Performance Computing (HPC) tools and support for the OpenMP standard for parallel computing." The University of Technology Aachen is home to one of the biggest SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) cluster implementations in the world. With the computing power of 2.3 teraflops to be installed in 2002, the supercomputer at Aachen is Sun's largest technical installation to date in the area of High Performance Computing (HPC). The updated Forte Developer suite, formerly known as Sun Workshop, and the new dbx utility have been tested with a wide variety of open source applications, including Apache, Mozilla, stlport, openssl, to maximize cross-platform interoperability. Forte Developer, along with Forte for Java and Forte for HPC, is an integral part of Sun ONE -- a complete, open architecture and integratable product portfolio to create, assemble, and deploy Web services. The new release of Forte Developer 6 update 2, including Forte C, C++ and Forte Fortran software, is available immediately at www.sun.com/forte . The upgrade can be downloaded at no charge for developers who already have Forte Developer 6. No new licenses are required. The product is available for the Solaris Operating Environment.