Oracle's comparatively recent stewardship of the Java language and platform came with additional family members, including the Solaris operating system. Just previewed at the company's OpenWorld event running in line with what is now JavaOne, Solaris 11 has unsurprisingly been billed as extremely cloud-compliant, optimized for both Oracle and third-party applications, and exists now as a core component of Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage Appliance.

Oracle details an "early adopter" release, which is a feature-complete preview of Solaris 11 for registered programmers, and says that developers are using this release to begin final qualification of their applications on the upcoming OS. With what Oracle describes as the "proven parallel capabilities" of Solaris, version 11 has been presented with a new software provisioning and maintenance infrastructure, designed for cloud and large enterprise deployments.

Offering a chance to deploy new data center software images across thousands of machines, Oracle says that Solaris 11 is the "first and only fully virtualized operating system" — and that it provides built-in virtualization services that allow developers and DBAs to maximize system, network, and data resources in their data centers with zero virtualization overhead.

The Oracle Solaris discussion board has listed a link to information about developing applications for and on Solaris, which can be found in the Solaris Developer Center forums. Deeper technical details are offered, in addition to what is said to be improved Java-based application performance, availability, security, and manageability through jointly engineered improvements such as optimized memory management, I/O enhancements, integrated resource management, and crypto off-load.