JavaOne wrapped up on Friday. We hosted individuals from across the globe, and from every industry: consumer electronics and gaming, to enterprise IT, space exploration, factory automation, the automotive industry, academia - like the network itself, Java delivers something for nearly everyone, everywhere.

This year's biggest announcements centered around Java's role in the future of rich internet applications (or RIA's). What's a rich internet application? It depends on your perspective - from mine, it's any network connected application that persists in front of a user, typically outside a browser, that can operate when disconnected from the network.

On the one hand, I'd claim Java's always been a RIA platform - before the world really wanted one. Early Java applets delivered interactivity, but at the expense of development complexity and, in the early days, performance - when a browser, and more recently Javascript, would …

Here are a few pictures from earlier this week taken at CommunityOne and day one of JavaOne. 

Podcasts a comin'

In the next few days I will also be posting a bunch of podcasts I did while in San Francisco including a bunch from key OpenSolaris folks, a post-Distro-smackdown recording,  an interview with the Fedora IcedTea guys and a chat with the JRuby dudes.

 
Mr. Finch exits -- Before …

We made some big announcements this week at our annual developer forums, CommunityOne and JavaOne. I thought I'd highlight a couple in particular.

We announced the first commercial release of OpenSolaris - targeting high speed developers and development teams (not consumers...). OpenSolaris focuses on developers wanting to be freed from proprietary software models, who see innovation and automation in operating systems as a source of competitive advantage.

If Solaris 10, OpenSolaris's older brother, is for IT departments prioritizing carrier grade stability over rapid innovation, OpenSolaris targets the exact opposite - developers, from high performance computing to social networking, that prioritize a constantly refreshing repository filled with community innovations (and ZFS-based automated rollback) over an unchanging qualification …

After all the fuss it appears that MySQL will be remaining open source after all. As Kaj Arno and Monty Widenius report, Marten Mickos announced at CommunityOne that the MySQL Server will stay open source, as well as the forthcoming encryption and compression backup features, which MySQL had considered making available only to paying customers.

“The change comes from MySQL now being part of Sun Microsystems. Our initial plans …

I briefly mentioned in my earlier post that OpenSolaris binary is probably just a chapter of a book. To really understand how the benefits of OpenSolaris lets look at the needs of a typical Software Application

A Software Application at a very base level of being a usage product needs the following:

1. Operating System: First and foremost which generally nobody wants to rewrite unless there is something missing that you really need. Generally it is part of "Systems requirement" which defines the operating systems supported.
2. Method of distributing the software: Either via CD, DVD or via internet downloads
3. Installer: Installing the software on the target machine
4. Patching/Upgrading: Upgrading the software when new versions are released (specially with security updates)

So how does OpenSolaris solve this problems?

Lets start with (1). For the first time that I am aware, …

OpenSolaris OS 2008.05 is now available for download.  Its quite a departure from traditional Solaris. Why? because the CD that one will be downloading is probably just a chapter in the full book. To understand the full picture one will have to really look at the bigger picture on how the whole deployment model is now changing. The full scope is not my topic of discussion but I probably want to focus on probably couple of pieces today in order to demonstrate on how to create a PostgreSQL OpenSolaris LiveCD.

In order to create a custom LiveCD, its probably best to start with OpenSolaris OS 2008.05 installation though it is not necessary as it can be done on Solaris Express installations also but needs pkg(5) to be installed. But the two things really required to create a custom LiveCD, you need one kit to download and a repository to access. The kit to download …

Lets start at the point where you have just installed OpenSolaris OS 2008.05 and have logged in using your primary userid on the system.

First thing to do is install the packages for PostgreSQL and MySQL on OpenSolaris OS 2008.05. Right click on the desktop and select "Open Terminal" to start a terminal session. Use "su" to assume the root userid. (The primary user already has root role however some programs still explicitly check for userid of root and hence needed to avoid unexpected surprises.)

Verify pkg is able to communicate with the IPS repository.

# pkg search -r postgres …

Tolven Inc an Open Source Healthcare Solutions provider recently carried out a benchmark using PostgreSQL on Solaris 10 using ZFS on Sun Fire X4600.  The Benchmark report is now available on their website.

The size of the  single database instance using PostgreSQL 8.2.6 (32-bit) peaked at 474GB with the largest table having more than 500 million rows. More information is in the report.

Tolven's  setup guide for developers which includes information about PostgreSQL  setup is also available on their website.

I paid great attention to Ian Murdock’s talk at LugRadio Live USA 2008, as he’s an important person at Sun in terms of the open source community, and I’m community facing as well. It was also the first time I got to meet Ian (after his talk), and we hit off a conversation really quickly. I look forward to working alongside Ian more… Now to the talk notes.

A Bit About Ian
- Linux user, developer, and advocate since 1993
- Founder of Debian, co-founder of Progeny
- Joined Sun in March 2007, Chief OS strategist (launched Project Indiana), and now since February 2008 is VP Developer and Community Marketing

What’s a Linux guy doing at Sun?
- When people say they want Linux… they don’t actually mean that they want Linux. You don’t only want the kernel, but you want the userspace as well. You really want a distribution, not Linux itself. Ian is more of an …