System News for Sun Users - The Blog

zembly is the world’s first collaborative environment specifically designed for creating social applications.

Through the use of just a browser, zembly allows Facebook apps, OpenSocial apps, Meebo apps, iPhone applications, widgets, Google gadgets and other social Web applications to be collaboratively built and published.

“There is no develop-deploy cycle to speak of, because the code is live, in the same way that wiki content is live and can be immediately edited by merely clicking an ‘edit’ link. If there is a bug in your application, simply click the button and the updated code is immediately live,” writes Sun’s Prakash Narayan, who is a member of the team working on this project.

zembly was launched June 6 for private beta, which means an invitation is required to join. Visit Narayan’s blog to request an invitation.

Developers creating applications on the OpenSocial platform can receive free hosting on Sun servers through Joyent. Sun and Joyent have partnered to make this offer available through Joyent’s Free Accelerator program.

With the OpenSocial Developers Program, developers will have access to a Joyent OpenSocial Developer Accelerator, which includes everything necessary to develop and deploy OpenSocial application. Developers will receive root access to a virtualized machine that includes all the tools for developing OpenSocial applications. This program is free for six months. The only requirement is that the OpenSocial application is active and in use.

Sun and Joyent have been offering free hosting to applications built for the Hi5 network, which was the first to release a complete set of APIs, reported Marshall. According to Sun, those applications over the past three weeks are already generating 100 million page views a month.

Led by Google, the OpenSocial platform is an effort to bring together multiple social networking companies to agree upon common standards so that developers can make a single application that works on all networks. Reportedly, Sun will be offering a separate program for Facebook soon.