The company is unveiling plans to open source its Sun Java System Message Queue, Sun Java System Portal Server 7 and its Java Studio Enterprise development tool, said Peder Ulander, vice president of marketing for software at Sun.
In addition, the company will release to open source the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) engine and the Java Composite Application Platform tools it acquired from SeeBeyond.
Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and CEO, was to formally announce the open-source software news in his keynote address at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco. He also planned to announce an initiative to release Sun's Web Services Interoperability Technology (WSIT) components related to security, messaging and metadata support to open source, Ulander said. The WSIT is the cornerstone technology for Sun's efforts to work with Microsoft Corp. to allow Java applications to run on the .Net Web services framework.
Finally, Sun was also laying out a roadmap for releasing its Java Studio Creator -- the company's IDE for Web applications -- to the open source community.
"Everything is moving towards Web 2.0," Ulander said. "JavaOne ... is really about supporting Web-tier application developers."
Shawn Willett, an analyst with Current Analysis Inc. in Sterling, Va., said the release of the messaging and BPEL tools, along with WSIT, signals that Sun is moving to provide the components for companies to build an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
"They are trying to come out with things a step ahead of JBoss, who doesn't have their act together in terms of an ESB yet," he said. "The SeeBeyond technology has a lot of features in it and will automatically be a leading open source contender."
In addition, Sun's portal is more feature rich than others available in open source, and likely will be popular in the open source community, he said.
Sun was selling the developer tools at rock-bottom prices already, he said. The move to release them to open source is designed to check the popularity of the open source Eclipse IDE, according to Willett.