Blogging Roller

Roller on OpenSolaris / Glassfish

Dave Johnson — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 07:14:57 +0000

Dave Koelmeyer offers a nice step-by-step guide to getting Roller up and running on OpenSolaris, Glassfish and MySQL.

Although WordPress undoubtedly has more bells and whistles, with themes and plug-ins galore, I find Roller quicker and less fussy in operation, with far more comprehensive documentation – and its scalability cannot be denied. This guide will enable you to install and run Apache Roller for the purposes of evaluation and tinkering.

We will be using OpenSolaris snv_134 x64, with Apache Roller 4.01, Glassfish v2.1, and MySQL 5.1.

Link

Sun should give up on the desktop?

Dave Johnson — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 17:27:19 +0000

Tim Bray: What Sun should do: Sun is going through a lousy spell right now. Well, so is the worldâ€™s economy in general and the IT business in particular, but this is about Sun. This is my opinion about what my employer should do about it.

It takes a lot of guts to write a piece like that and I'm really glad Tim did it. I'm going to walk out on the same limb and agree with pretty much everything Tim wrote. Tim wants Sun to focus like a laser on providing the best web platform around with Solaris, storage offerings, Java/Hotspot, Glassfish, MySQL and Netbeans for Java, Ruby, PHP, Groovy, etc. tooling. He writes:

Itâ€™s easy to understand how our servers, CMT and x86, and the Solaris OS, fit into the Web Suite. All the software, including the HotSpot, GlassFish, and MySQL runtimes, needs to be obsessively tuned and optimized to run best in the context of the Suite. Obviously, the Suite will also include Ruby and Python and PHP runtimes, similarly tuned.

All of Sunâ€™s software tooling should have a laser focus on usability, performance, and ease of adoption for the Web Suite.

I agree, but as a web geek I guess I'm pretty biased.

Tim doesn't shy away from the critical question of what Sun should stop doing. Tim says Sun should give up on the client-side, dropping JavaFX and JavaME (and OpenOffice too, I presume). Here's Tim on JavaFX:

For actual business apps, the kind that our servers spend most of their time running, the war for the desktop is over and the Web Browser won. I just totally donâ€™t believe that any combination of Flash and Silverlight and JavaFX is going to win it back.

I can't say I disagree with that either. Cutting JavaFX and JavaME would be extremely tough and painful decisions, but somebody's going to make to make some of those. Looking at things from Tim's web-platform-only point of view, they make sense. Sun needs only enough client-side software to keep Solaris attractive to developers and to support great development tools on all the platforms that web developers love.

Sun Ultra 24 and OpenSolaris 2008.05 first impressions

Dave Johnson — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:30:45 +0000

I know, it's not near as sexy as an iPhone or MacBook unboxing, but I'm certainly digging my new box so I'm gonna blog it up.

What happened was, my old noisy as hell w2100z decided to burn down, fall over and sink into the swamp. Frankly, I wasn't that disappointed -- I had stopped using it in recent months because it wasn't all that much faster than my personal MacBook Pro. The next day I talked to my manager Tony Ng for something new, he pointed me to the catalog and after sizing things up, I ordered a Sun Ultra 24 with an Intel Core2 Quad Extreme processor, 6GB of RAM and two 250GB drives.

The out-of-box experience

I haven't bought a new PC in about 4 years, so I'm not sure how the Ultra stacks up against other boxes on the market. If you want a real review, then check this out: "Sun Shines with the Ultra 24 Workstation - built like a tank, yet offers toolless access to components." And I ordered the box from an internal system at Sun, so I'm not sure how my experience compares with the normal customer experience. My experience went pretty smoothly, despite the fact that the additional RAM and disk I ordered came separately. The case was very easy to open, the memory slots were easy to access and the new drive snapped into place with no cabling, no problem at all. Oh, and it's quiet. Very quiet.

Works great with Windows

The Ultra came with Solaris 10 installed, but I need OpenSolaris and Windows for my work. So, I booted up from my Windows XP disk, installed it into a partition on disk 1, installed the appropriate drives from CD that came with the Ultra. I verified that things were working by trying Spore Creature Creator at 1900x1200 resolution and it was mighty damn snappy.

And OpenSolaris too

Next, I booted from the OpenSolaris 2005.05 CD that I picked up at JavaOne and ran through the slick GUI installer -- just as simple and straight forward as Ubuntu. Once the install was complete I booted from the Ultimate Boot CD, installed the GAG Boot Manager so I can choose either OpenSolaris or XP on boot. Gotta say, OpenSolaris looks great. Much, much improved over the last build I tried (Nevada/b55 I think). The UI is essentially the same as Ubuntu, including the CompViz eye-candy.

Once I got settled in, I started installing the software I need for SocialSite and Roller development on OpenSolaris. I tried to use the new Package Manager UI for everything, but made some exceptions. Here's a rundown of the stuff I installed to get going:

Java SE 6 SDK because OpenSolaris only includes JRE. I downloaded it directly from Sun.com because it was not immediately obvious which option to take in the Package Manager UI.
Netbeans 6.1 downloaded directly from Sun, because Package Manager only had Netbeans 6.0. It included Glassfish v2 and Tomcat 6.0.
MySQL 5.0 from Package Manager and used the Services UI to start it up, not sure why it wasn't started automatically on install.
Subversion and CVS from Package Manager, no problems there.
Ant 1.7.1 downloaded from Apache (Package Manager only had 1.6.5)
Downloaded the Sun Punchin VPN client from an internal Sun site and set it up with a couple of pkgadd commands.
Downloaded and installed Virtual Box directly from VirtualBox.org

I think it's pretty cool how much Sun software is in that list. Anyhow... I've been using the new box and OpenSolaris for a week now and have no complaints. All and all a great experience for me and for my MacBook Pro, which is now getting some much deserved rest. Thanks Tony

Latest Links: Android, OpenSolaris and misc.

Dave Johnson — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 17:00:03 +0000

Roy Fielding [ogb-discuss]: please dissolve the Desktop Community
"there is absolutely no reason for this organization to exist if all decisions are going to be made by Sun."
Ian Murdock [ogb-discuss]: re: please dissolve the Desktop Community
"You have to be joking? I don't even know where to begin.. This is like Robert's Rules of Order run amok"
Jim Grisanzio: Two Great Linus Quotes
"(1) one person or company shouldn't control the entire community, and (2) the real value of community development comes over the long term and results from many small contributions, not one big one."

Ed Burnette: Sun/Google Android â€œfightâ€ overblown
"Iâ€™m here to tell you, itâ€™s all bunk"..."However Google did make one big mistake with Android"
Slashdot: Google, Sun Headed for Showdown Over Android
Pure FUDtastic speculation based on Stefano's blog post
robilad: QOTD: Google's license for the Android SDK
"you may not extract the source code or create a derivative work of the SDK"
Javalobby: Is Google the New Microsoft?
Dalibor's comment: "Google will keep Android as proprietary as they can for as long as they can, while letting people believe something else"

David Heffelfinger: Eclipse Veteran Switches To NetBeans
"NetBeans has now surpassed Eclipse in usability. Count me in as a new convert."
Stuck in the middle : Weblog
Rickard Oberg is blogging at JRoller.com again
Alan Burlison's Blog: How to leave Facebook
"try mailing them, quoting the clear precedent they have set by closing my account"
Symphonious Â» Why Support OpenSocial?
"However, if OpenSocial gets support outside social networks it has the possibility of attracting developers who actually care about their users, not just their advertising profits and install count"
ZDNet: Firefox 3 Beta 1 has landed
"Improved performance with more than 300 memory leak fixes."

Congrats

Dave Johnson — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 13:02:07 +0000

Congrats to Mark Pilgrim on his new job at Google, where he'll be working on the "right" vision for the future of the web. I assume the "wrong" vision, in Mark's mind, comes from the W3C and specifically the W3C's semantic web activities. Mark's comment pointing to his earlier The Overton Window post seems to back that up. I think it's interesting that Mark will be working remotely; that's a rare thing at Google.

And congrats to Debian Linux co-founder Ian Murdock on his new job at Sun, where he'll be working on all things OpenSolaris and, I hope, helping to make it as easy and fun to use as Debian or even Ubuntu.

OpenSolaris in 2007

Dave Johnson — Tue, 2 Jan 2007 09:03:00 +0000

Paul Murphy: By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognised as larger and more active than the Linux community - and every competing OS developer community except Microsoft's will have copied the key ideas including its organisational structure, the core provisions in the community development license, and Solaris specific technologies including ZFS and Dtrace.

That's a nice way to start the new year. No doubt plenty of Sun bloggers will be linking to Paul's predictions.