Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...

Arun Gupta is a technology enthusiast, a passionate runner, and a community guy who works for Sun Microsystems.

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Wednesday December 05, 2007

Packaging Java Apps for Ubuntu @ FOSS.IN

I presented on "Packaging Java Apps for Ubuntu" as part of the Debian-Ubuntu Project Day at FOSS.IN yesterday. Thanks to Harpreet for giving me the opportunity to talk. The slides are available here.

I've given multiple talks worldwide but this was my first formal conference in India and so was pretty excited. The talk explained the offerings of Ubuntu desktop, explained Debian packaging system, described how GlassFish was delivered in Ubuntu and then finally the lessons learned. The lessons learned from delivering GlassFish in Ubuntu could be applied to any Java application.

Here were the questions that were asked during the session:

How does GlassFish interact with existing packages in Ubuntu/Debian ?

GlassFish "requires" the JDK package and expects it to be present during installation. If the package is not present, then the underlying Ubuntu packaging mechanism first downloads it and installs it. GlassFish is not dependent on any other packages during runtime.

For build time, it depends on debhelper package. This brings in debuild which is used to build the packages.
GlassFish v2 takes time to start up. How can that be improved ?

Read tips in GlassFish Tuning Primer to optimize the performance of your GlassFish. GlassFish v3 takes this to the next level by providing a fast (starts up < 1 sec), small (kernel < 100 kb) and modular (load only the required containers) App server. A preview is available and the production release will be available in 2009.

Sun Microsystems is a Platinum sponsor of the conference and was given a big booth space. If you visit Sun booth, you can see the back panel with a list of all the major open source projects that Sun is involved with, including but not limited to GlassFish, NetBeans, JavaDB, OpenPortal, OpenDS, OpenSolaris, OpenSPARC and many others. And this does not even talk about all the sub-projects that are under each of the communities. For example, GlassFish has Metro, jMaki, Jersey and many others.

I would love to stay for the entire duration of the conference but have to meet some folks in a different city. My short stay at the conference was nice. The Ubuntu Project Day was running ahead of schedule and so the conference organizers were courteous to invite me earlier and give me little extra time as well. Thanks for that!

On the food front, I was slightly disappointed because not even once I get to see Sambar/Dosa, not even once. The breakfast, lunch and dinner - none of them were serving Dosas :( Hopefully I'll be able to feast on my next stop at Chennai.

Here are some pictures I captured moving around the city: