A Jolt of Caffeine for Ubuntu 7.04
As I mentioned in my last entry, back in November Sun and Canonical
announced that GlassFish would be included in the next Ubuntu release.
Well today's the day. Ubuntu 7.04 nee "Feisty Fawn" is out and not
only is GlassFish v1 included in the Ubuntu Multiverse but so are
NetBeans 5.5, JDK 6 and Java DB 10.2 -- the whole Java stack in one
location. A big plus for developers looking to harness Java with
minimal hassles. (Check out the details)
Getting to Today: The effort to package these puppys for inclusion
turned out to be no small feat. Sun is new to the packaging game and
there is quite steep learning curve. Thanks to a lot of late nights
and a few weekends Tom Marble and Harpreet Singh, with a bunch of help
and advice from the Canonical crew and Sun legal, got it done.
(Ironically, Canonical will be coming out to Sun's Menlo Park campus in
a couple of weeks to put on a technical workshop explaining, among
other things, how to package for Ubuntu.)
Getting to Tomorrow: In general the distro model with its modular
packages is where Sun needs to get to. We need this so that we can get
more of our software into GNU/Linux distros and we need this for our
own Solaris. The monolithic-wad model that we've been employing works
fine for our more traditional customer but isnt the right approach for
the growth (or as Sun calls it "Red Shift") market. The hyper growth
market needs to be able to rapidly include and assemble components and
functionality themselves. This requires packaging and package
management. I know that Ian's been talking about this as has Greg P.
I would love to see us packaging more of our software for inclusion in
Ubuntu as well as other distros.
But thats Tomorrow...today, a huge toast to the Ubuntu community for
delivering another great release (right on time!) and to Tom, Harpreet
and the Canonical crew for making sure that it was fully caffeinated!
P.S. In honor of this red-letter day we have created special commemorative mints and gum.
Pau for now...
