Sun to Tout Hosting Platform

Sun will discuss on Thursday a research and development project intended to provide a hosting platform for delivering Internet-based services.

Called Project Caroline, the technology is on the agenda of a Sun Labs Open House taking place at Sun offices in Menlo Park, California. The platform comprises a programmatically configurable pool of virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources, according to Sun.

The Project Caroline Web page states that the project is designed to serve an emerging market of small and medium-sized SaaS providers.

“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,” the Web page states.

Services can programmatically allocate, monitor, and control virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources via Project Caroline. Interfaces are featured for managing platform resources.

Developers can build services that update and flex platform resources usage. Project Caroline resources are exposed via high-level abstractions, including virtual machines, networks, and network-accessible file systems and databases. A horizontally scaled pool of distributed resources is presented as a single system to provide developers with a unified platform for allocating and controlling resources.

Also on the Open House agenda are OMS, pertaining to a royalty-free media system; Project Live, approaching software distribution and configuration by combining the firmware model with customization; and the Lively Kernel project for Web programming.

Other agenda items include: Project Wonderland, an open-source toolkit for building 3D virtual worlds for business and education collaboration; Project Darkstar, which is a gaming server; and Project MiRTLE (Mixed Reality Teaching and Learning Environment).

Nokia Readies iPhone Response

Nokia remains at work on its answer to the Apple iPhone, codenamed “Tube,” a company official said on Monday.

Shown in a slide at the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference in Redwood City, California, Tube looks similar to the popular iPhone. The Nokia device showed graphical displays, such as a promotion for the movie Shrek the Third. Other capabilities will be featured, such as the ability to upload photos.

“It’s our first touch device,” said Tom Libretto, vice president of Forum Nokia. Interfacing with the system is done via touch similar to the iPhone. He said the company has not published the planned date of shipment for Tube.

Nokia believes it can compete with iPhone, and during his presentation, Libretto compared volume shipments of iPhone to Nokia’s shipments of phones. Since the launch of iPhone in June, Apple has shipped 5 million to 6 million of the devices, paling in comparison to Nokia’s device shipments, Libretto said. “We’ve done that [volume] since we’ve had dinner on Friday,” he said.

(Apple afterward said 4 million iPhones had shipped worldwide by January.)

The Tube will support Java, something Apple has been reluctant to do with iPhone.

Mozilla Launches Final Firefox 3.0 Beta

Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 landed on Mozilla’s download servers on Wednesday.

Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s interface designer, highlighted several changes to the open-source browser, including improved UI integration with the underlying operating system, performance gains from additional changes to the JavaScript engine, and an unspecified number of bug fixes and modifications for features new in Firefox 3.0, such as the full-page zoom and bookmark backup and restore.

Beltzner also called out other speed optimizing changes “to improve performance over previous releases as measured by the popular SunSpider [JavaScript] test from Apple, and in the speed of Web applications like Google [ Gmail ] and Zoho Office.”

Beta 5′s release was delayed somewhat by the discovery last week of a serious bug in the Mac version of the browser, which required fixing before Mozilla would sign off on the preview.

Updated release notes also published today noted that Beta 5 includes more than 750 changes since the rollout of Beta 4 about three weeks ago.

Last Beta

Today’s beta will be the last for Firefox 3.0, Mozilla’s chief engineer has said, and developers will be moving on to Release Candidate 1 (RC1). In notes from a Monday meeting that have been posted to the Mozilla Web site, the code-freeze date for the release candidate has been set as next Tuesday.

Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, said last week that he expects Firefox 3.0 to run through three release candidates before the final version. Mozilla has targeted June for delivering the browser.

Firefox 3 Beta 4 can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in 40 languages from Mozilla’s site .

However, as has been its practice with every beta, Mozilla again warned casual users against using the preview. “Firefox 3 Beta 5 is a developer preview release of Mozilla’s next generation Firefox browser and is being made available for testing purposes only,” the release notes read.

Mozilla Fixes 10 Firefox Flaws, Half Seen as ‘Critical’

Mozilla patched 10 vulnerabilities, half of them marked “critical,” in its open-source browser as it updated Firefox to version 2.0.0.13. The new Mozilla Messaging spin-off, however, was not able to provide a matching update to its Thunderbird e-mail client, which shares five of the Firefox flaws that were fixed.

Mozilla’s six advisories spelled out five Firefox bugs marked “critical,” three tagged “high” and one each “moderate” and “low.”

“There’s a little bit here to interest most everyone,” said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security. “The bulletins claim no favor in the many types of vulnerabilities typically associated with browsers.”

Among the critical flaws were a pair that could be exploited to crash the browser or its JavaScript engine, and perhaps do more. “Some of these crashes showed evidence of memory corruption under certain circumstances and we presume that with enough effort at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code,” Mozilla wrote in the advisory pegged as 2008-15.

Mozilla also patched potential identity leaks, spoofing bugs and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in 2.0.0.13. But the fix that caught Storms’ eye was detailed by 2008-18, a fix for LiveConnect, a feature that harks back to Firefox’s predecessor, Netscape Navigator. LiveConnect lets Java applets call a Web page’s embedded JavaScript, or JavaScript access the Java runtime libraries, and is used by both Firefox and Apple Inc.’s Safari 3 browser.

“Sun has updated the Java Runtime Environment with a fix for this problem. Mozilla has also added a fix to LiveConnect to protect users who don’t have the latest version of Java,” Mozilla said in the advisory.

“Here we have Firefox putting out a mitigation step for a bug in Java,” said Storms. “It’s a welcomed addition when one vendor can help out another.”