Sun stresses multicore chips, Linux with dev tool

Platform upgraded for C, C++, and Fortran
Sun will unveil compiler and tool technologies on Monday that leverage multicore chip architectures and extend to Linux application development.

Sun Studio 12 enables development in the C, C++, and Fortran languages for Solaris and, now, Linux. Developers can build enterprise transactional and Web applications and migrate existing programs to support multithreaded capabilities, according to Sun.

"With Sun Studio 12, we are continuing that tradition of record-breaking performance. However, the big message with this release is about multithreaded development," said Sun's Jeet Kaul, vice president of developer products and programs.

With the emergence of multicore chips from Sun and Intel, developers are under pressure to build multithreaded software that leverages multicore chips, Kaul said. "What we have done with Sun Studio 12 is we have made the building of these multithreaded applications easier," he said.

With multicore processors, programmers need to be able to write software that features parallelism. Although Sun already has offered this, Sun Studio 12 provides more tools for it, such as its thread and performance analyzers, Kaul said.

"Both of these tools have the ability to understand multiple threads," said Kaul.

In addition, Sun Studio 12 is the first time Sun is supporting C, C++, and Fortran development for Linux, Kaul said. Developers also can build applications on Linux and compile them, then take the same application with the same source code and run it on Solaris, said Kaul.

Sun's enabling Sun Studio 12 to be used across Solaris and Linux and on different architectures such as Intel and SPARC is valuable to the scientific community, which comprises a good portion of the user base, said analyst Joe Niski of Burton Group.

"I think they made a lot of really smart moves in terms of getting broader reach, not just for the IDE but for the compilers," Niski said.

Sun Studio 12, which is offered free of charge, is based on the NetBeans 5.5 platform. It is accessible on Sun's Web site. Sun offers support services for Sun Studio 12.

Google's Book Search available in publisher sites

For the first time, the Book Search engine will be available outside of google.com, and publishers can tailor searches so that only their own books will show up as results
Google is making its controversial Book Search engine available to publishers interested in putting it on their Web sites.

This is the first time Google's Book Search service has been available outside of its main site in the Google.com domain.

This co-branded search program benefits Google because the search engine will now be available more broadly. Meanwhile, publishers benefit by offering an additional search service to their Web site visitors.

Publishers can tailor the index of their search engine so that only books published by them show up in the query results, Google said Friday. As in the main Book Search site, these result pages give users the option to link to online shops that sell the listed books.

Interestingly, one of the publishers that put Book Search on its Web site is The McGraw-Hill Companies. Along with other major publishers, McGraw-Hill is suing Google for copyright infringement over Google's ongoing project to scan millions of copyright books without permission.

Although McGraw-Hill's position may seem at first contradictory, it stems from the fact that Google's Book Search service has two main pieces.

One focuses on securing formal partnerships with publishers, obtaining their permission to scan books and giving them control over how much of those books can be displayed by Google for free.

McGraw-Hill is one of about 10,000 publishers that participate in this partner program with Google that have collectively made available about 1 million titles for scanning so far, said Tom Turvey, director of Google Book Search partnerships. About 50 publishers have embedded Book Search in their sites already, and many more are in line to do so, Turvey said. McGraw-Hill didn't immediately reply to a request for comment.

Simultaneously, McGraw-Hill objects to the other portion of the Book Search operation, in which Google partners with major academic libraries to scan large portions of their collections. Those library scanning operations often involve copyrighted books, which Google is digitally copying without obtaining permission from publishers and authors.