If you think that Sun Microsystems is that Java company, then you've a lot of news to catch up on. Charles Nutter, co-lead on the JRuby project at Sun, gives a quick round-up of a plethora of initiatives that Sun is working on, for the individual open source developer and the little start-up guy, besides bringing Ruby to the enterprise.

Maxine is a self hosting virtual machine written entirely in Java, with the source code released into the open source community. For the Smalltalk fans, Dan Ingalls at Sun is writing a development environment for Squeak that gives you all the graphics and windows like Squeak does, but it is written entirely in Java, and it runs inside the browser. Currently running on Firefox and Safari, inroads are being made to make it compatible with other popular browsers. To take advantage of multiple cores in today's processors, Sun has launched the Fortress project, a programming language for high performance computing.

Sun Microsystems is committed to developers, and just a few out of the many ways it shows this is by funding JRuby development, committing patches to the Ruby team, and donating servers to the core Ruby development team. Its Network.com project is aimed at providing developer access to Sun's utility hardware. Finally, the DaVinci machine project is an effort on its part to take the OpenJDK and evolve it to run dynamic and functional programming languages.

For the little start-ups that are the YouTube's and the Google's of tomorrow, Sun is offering discounts on its hardware as a part of the Start-up Essentials project.