Sun Microsystems Inc. officials are touting the benefits of a research project for running Internet services that is known as Project Caroline. Project Caroline presents a hosted platform based on the platform-as-service model as well as a new mode of operations for developers by providing a hosted platform, a computing grid and virtualization.

Sun recently held a Sun Labs Open House event at its Menlo Park, California facility. The research project is based on an effort to make it easier to build applications akin to the hosted service, Salesforce.com. The project blends programming languages such as Java and Perl with a computing grid and virtualization.

Caroline addresses the need for deployment of horizontally scaled services and enabling developers to get their services running, while the project's infrastructure provides a lightweight, low-risk option for running services.

Developers write a service using an application programming interface (API) to set up the environment the service needs. Using Project Caroline, applications will have a service component, and developers in this new paradigm will move from just writing code to writing and running code, according to Sun. Virtualization is used for isolating different services and users and provisioning resources between applications, while storage services are also featured.

While Project Caroline currently exists in a grid in a data center in Burlington, Massachusetts, there is no set date on which Sun will make an actual product out of Caroline’s technology, and Sun indicated that at this point everything is still a project.