Sun Microsystems' Zembly project, which provided an environment for building and hosting social applications, will be suspended on November 30, according to a posting on the Zembly blog.

All applications and services on Zembly will be unavailable when the site is suspended, said the posting from the Zembly team. Code from widgets, services, and applications can be taken down from Zembly until that time. Access to third-party APIs will be removed on November 30 as well.

[ InfoWorld's Paul Krill reports on Sun's original Zembly goal: a Wikipedia for social applications. ]

The three-year-old project had remained in a beta stage. Zembly was intended to make it easy to create "next-generation Web apps," according to the blog. "Our original tagline was 'Build the Web, using the Web,' and the ideas we were incubating around platform-mediated Web applications, Web API mashups, and social programming were brand new," the team, which has featured CTO Todd Fast, said in the posting.

"We learned a lot along the way. Your confidence and enthusiasm helped us improve the project and do amazing things that we never imagined when we began this journey. Thank you to everyone who's been with us through the ups and downs. It's heartening to see that many of the best ideas pioneered in Zembly have started to appear elsewhere. With your support, we're proud to have contributed to the DNA of the Web," the posting said.

A Sun representative late Wednesday afternoon said the company could not comment on why Zembly was being closed down. Sun, though, is in the process of being acquired by Oracle, a process that has hit a roadblock in the form of European Union concerns.

Sun announced layoffs of an additional 3,000 employees late last month.

This story, "Sun shuts down Zembly social apps development effort," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in application development at InfoWorld.com.