Tools to back Linux, developer community portal readied Sun Microsystems on Thursday at the LinuxWorld conference in New York City plans to emphasize its support of application development for Linux through a commitment to tools and a new online community.Sun tools all will back Linux development, company officials said.“Our entire line of development tools, both our Java development tools as well as C, C++, and Fortran tools, will be made available on Linux by the end of this calendar year,” said Sanjay Sarathy, director for developer programs at Sun, on Wednesday. Tools included in this effort are Sun Studio, Sun Java Studio Enterprise, and the upcoming Sun Java Studio Creator, which the company has been portraying as its easy-to-use tool for Java development.Sun Studio is slated to offer GUI-based debugging that will provide for multi-threaded, multi-process debugging; performance analysis and the Native Connector Tool, for binding and encapsulating native Linux C/C++ applications and libraries as Java classes.Additionally, a portal extension to the java.net site for developers will focus on Linux. It can be found at linux.java.net and includes software tools and project infrastructure to support collaborative development projects. Also to be featured are communication channels such as Weblogs, “wikis,” and other interactive forums. “This is the site where Java developers can go and collaborate and innovate with one another and where code and projects can be built from scratch,” Sarathy said.As part of the Linux effort, Sun will provide a “community manager” to shepherd Linux projects on the site. Art Gould, an official in the Sun developer programs, will server as the community manager.Sun co-sponsors java.net with O’Reilly & Associates and CollabNet. Software Development