SunWorld celebrates year #3 online We reflect on our past and look toward the future By Carolyn W.C. Wong, SunWorld Editor-in-Chief

July  1998

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(If you'd like a more detailed account of SunWorld's humble beginnings, you can read our president's July 1997 editorial.)

By last June we had weaned ourselves entirely from the Sun sponsorship, though we remained hosted on its server, and we've been on our own and supporting ourselves through advertising sales ever since. This year's anniversary coincides with another such move.

With Sun's blessing, we recently removed SunWorld from Sun's site, though we still have a link on its home page. This pleases our Webmaster, as we no longer have to rely on Sun technically. The move also gives us more control over our log files (which we use to stay on top of what you want to read) and advertising data, which should make our advertisers happy. Hopefully this move will also put to rest any lingering suspicion that we're a Sun-owned publication.

Of course, all the old URLs will still work, as they'll simply be redirected to us, but if you want to keep your bookmark file up to date simply replace any instances of www.sun.com/sunworldonline with www.sunworld.com.

Wow, what a year
Among other top news stories, this year saw the beginning of Java's ascent through the ISO standardization process and Sun's lawsuit against Microsoft (not to mention Microsoft's countersuit and the NT/Solaris battles). All in all, we've been kept on our toes keeping you up-to-the-minute with all the Sun-related headlines.

We didn't just report the news, however. We offered in-depth coverage of the Java/ISO and Sun/Microsoft lawsuit stories from the source you trust the most -- your peers in the developer community.

Better still, you weren't shy about sharing your thoughts on these issues, and we've faithfully printed and archived the results -- most notably in our survey of reader opinion on the Sun/Microsoft lawsuit.

We're especially proud, this year, of being the first to break a number of top news stories before anyone else even got a whiff of them:

• "Sun releases scripting technology for Java"
• "Sun's Encore acquisition threatened"
• "Goodbye NEO, hello Enterprise JavaBeans"
• "Tcl's inventor leaves Sun to form startup"
• "Does Sun want to become the next Microsoft?"

We even scooped the Wall Street Journal (a feather in any good reporter's cap) with our coverage of the changes at Elvis+. That story was also picked up by the San Jose Mercury News for its online edition.

In between pounding out news stories and editing features and columns, SunWorld Senior Editor Robert McMillan visited with Paul Vixie and Larry Wall and took a trip up to Redmond for an inside peek at Microsoft's Unix group. (Look for Bob's interview with Linus Torvalds in an upcoming issue.)

We've also debuted a couple of new columns since our last birthday, including the very popular Inside Solaris, which hit the stands for the first time last August, and IT Architect, which has been garnering positive reader response since March.

While a feature that appeared in our very first issue, "Java: The inside story," remains SunWorld's all-time most popular story, the Linux piece we ran in January is looking like it just might catch up someday soon.

Other top reader picks from this past year's archives include:

• "Using BIND: Don't get spoofed again"
• "Putting Perl together"
• "What's the point of XML?"
• "Getting started with Python"
• "Choosing a scripting language"

But that's just a sampling of our most recent hits; we've built up three years worth of back-issues, complete with resources, live code, and links, which you can easily access by clicking here.

Finally, I want to thank all of you for your continued support of SunWorld. We've more than doubled our page views in the past year to 600,000+ per month, and our readership has grown to more than 90,000 subscribers. As always, drop us a note if you have any suggestions or gripes. We encourage and appreciate your feedback.

If you have technical problems with this magazine, contact webmaster@sunworld.com

URL: http://www.sunworld.com/swol-07-1998/swol-07-editorial.html
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