Saturday April 21, 2007

I flew up to the Santa Clara campus Monday - Friday to meet my fellow Glassfish peers, as well as some in management and the field (sales). It was a whirlwind of a time as I spent 95% of my time in meetings, with the remaing 5% scheduling more meetings via email. These meetings were both necessary and productive, so don't get me wrong. I learned a heck of a lot in a short period of time and met a lot of new faces. Email is efficient and all, but relationships are stronger and build more quickly with some face-to-face time.

What impressed me the most during the visit was not a "can do" attitude but a "will do" attitude exuded by the folks I met. Seriously.  While everyone has their formal responsibilities, many accept informal responsibilities when things just need to get done. There is quite a bit of passion behind Glassfish at Sun, and it shows. Geez, it is infectious. It's one of the reasons I took on the role of Glassfish Product Manager. Yikes! That reminds me, time to get new business cards. "Field Geek" doesn't cut it anymore.

All metrics I see show Glassfish is moving in the right direction. Vibrant and growing community. 3 Million downloads a year.  Growing distribution channel.  It's simply hard to not take a look at Glassfish nowadays. Free for development and deployment. Improved performance.  Dynamic Clustering. Stay current with the Glassfish Update Center, just like you stay current with NetBeans via the Netbeans Update Center today. I can't leave out that Glassfish runs well in Solaris Zones (this is the Clingan Zone after all). You'll have the opportunity to hear more about Glassfish at JavaOne. If you get a chance, stop by the Glassfish booth  and say hi. I'll be spending part of my time doing booth duty.

If you would like hook up at JavaOne, drop me a note.

Wednesday January 10, 2007

I spent a couple of days toying around with Solaris distributions under VMWare over the holiday. Parse that as 1.5 days of downloading and .5 days of installing :) In particular Nexenta, Nevada b55 and Solaris 10. I'm old hat at Nevada and Solaris 10, but a complete newbie to Nexenta. Nexenta uses the Debian/Ubuntu packaging/distribution mechanisms on top of the OpenSolaris kernel. Note, I've only toyed with Ubuntu but others I know and respect endorse it. I thought i would give it a try.

On the surface Nexenta looks rather simple, but I haven't had time to dig very deep. I toyed around with package management, which is what Ubuntu/Nexenta are touted most for. Java SE 6 doesn't yet ship with Nexenta I was quite disappointed when I couldn't install the file-based Java SE 6 build on Nexenta:

Unpacking ...
Checksumming ...
The download file appears to be corrupted.

There is additional verbage telling me how screwed I am, but you get the point :) I also ran into a problem with java tools bundle (with NetBeans), although that also required an additional Nexenta package install (can't recall which - sorry). At some point I'll debug the problem (I'll start with sh -x).

In addition to Nexenta, I downloaded Nevada build 55 with a boatload of developer tools. More on that in a future blog entry. The goal with this VM is to test out some new NetBeans functionality, install the NetBeans 6 daily builds, help beta test zonemgr 1.8. FYI, the JDK install works in the Nevada VM, so the downloaded bits are not corrupted.

I'll also be updating my container demo in the Nevada VM. Once I get the installation a bit cleaner, I'll think about where to take the darn thing. Put it up on OpenSolaris.org? Keep it a demo? Make it a tool? Dunno. Thoughts are welcome.

VMWare is a great product for just these situations. It may seem odd to some of you that I am running Solaris containers under VMWare, but the two technologies complement each other. VMWare enables multiple Operating System versions (or different Operating Systems altogether) to run on the same server, and Solaris Containers keep applications under Solaris isolated.