As part of the OpenSolaris announcement, Amazon and the OpenSolaris community are announcing that OpenSolaris will be available in a hosted fashion via Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). Customers can access the product without having to purchase the hardware to run it.

"It's a flexible model for developers who are looking for a quick [place] to run apps," without having to leverage their own datacenter, said Juan Carlos Soto, Sun vice president of global market development and engineering.

Developers could, for example, build Web 2.0 applications requiring a Web presence and serving many users. OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2 will be available Monday in a limited beta form.

Sun and the NetBeans community are announcing availability Monday of an early access release of a NetBeans IDE to work with PHP. The NetBeans IDE Early Access for PHP offers intelligent editing capabilities, such as prioritized code completion and dynamic code templates.

Support for PHP follows a path of expanding NetBeans to work with more languages than Java, said Greg Sporar, Sun technology evangelist for NetBeans. C, C++, and Ruby support have been added in previous releases.

"It's not just a Java IDE anymore. It hasn't been for a long time," Sporar said. The general release of the PHP IDE is planned for this fall.

With the NetBeans 6.1 IDE release, Sun adds capabilities for developing AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) applications using JavaScript. Tighter integration with the MySQL database also is highlighted. JavaScript code can be written to run in such browsers as Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer.

"We also have added some nice features for people doing Web services development in Java," via new REST (Representational State Transfer) support, Sporar said. Developers can access REST-style APIs, such as those offered by Google and Yahoo.

Also featured in version 6.1 are faster startup and code completion, a new Ruby platform manager and support for IBM's Rational ClearCase version control system.

NetBeans improvements also are being revealed at CommunityOne, a precursor to the JavaOne conference.