Santa Clara, CA - April 3rd, 2006 - Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: SUNW) has announced the first two versions of its "Standard Edition" Java development environment aimed specifically at the embedded market.

Sun's initial releases of Java Platform SE for the embedded market include:

• A "headless" build stripped of most graphical interface components, such as "swing" - allowing it to squeeze into 25MB of flash memory
• A build for PowerPC, an architecture popular in network and storage appliances, as well as telecom infrastructure hardware

Sun believes Java Platform SE has become increasingly viable in the embedded market, due to the growing processor and memory resources in typical embedded designs. Sun also believes that "standard" Java will appeal to an embedded market increasingly moving away from high-maintenance, do-it-yourself designs, and toward COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) hardware and software, including PowerPC processors and GNU/Linux.

Dave Hofert, of Sun's Java Embedded and Real-Time Group, commented, "It's hard to maintain specialized devices. If you are running Linux, and you can use a mainstream processor and get enough memory in there, you can start thinking about Java SE, and you can have a lot of functionality."

The Java release was built on the Open Desktop Workstation and is available for download from Sun: http://java.sun.com/j2se/embedded/.