Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

Monday December 22, 2008

Sun Web Stack 1.4 Release

Sun Web Stack 1.4 has now been released. You can download the release now if you plan to install on Solaris 10 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For OpenSolaris, the same software has been integrated into the package repository, so you can obtain the Sun Web Stack 1.4 release there by simply adding the packages you would like. There are some package clusters, like "amp" and "ruby" to simplify adding multiple packages, and there is a pretty slick, developer oriented GUI in the "webstack-ui" package. For more details on the packages in the OpenSolaris 2008.11 release, which aligns to Sun Web Stack 1.4, refer to the getting started guide.

I've been working with both Cool Stack and the OpenSolaris Web Stack projects for some time. Starting with OpenSolaris 2008.11 and Sun Web Stack 1.4 (the logical successor to Cool Stack 1.3.x), we've brought the two projects closer together. I'm sure this will raise some questions, and since I've been involved in both I think I'm in a position to help answer a few of them.

Why is the new release version "1.4"?

Astute observers have probably wondered why it's called Sun Web Stack 1.4 and not 1.0 or 2.0. Cool Stack users may recall that the last release was version 1.3.1. The choice of version 1.4 is a subtle way of saying this is the successor to Cool Stack 1.3.1. In fact, most of the components use the same optimizations (with a slightly different build process) and have been built and tested by the same engineers-- they're just updated components. The only exception is MySQL (more on that later).

Why did MySQL go from version 5.1 in Cool Stack 1.3.x to 5.0 in Sun Web Stack 1.4?

When we started work on Cool Stack 1.3, MySQL 5.1 was expected out any day, so it was updated to be current once Cool Stack 1.3 was released. Shanti and others in PAE did a lot of experimentation with MySQL 5.1 and found it to have a number of advantages. Problem was, the update didn't come out, and Cool Stack was ready to ship. We had to make a choice, so we decided to release Cool Stack with MySQL 5.1, with the thought to update it later once MySQL had a Community Server final release. The problem was, eventually we got to the point that Cool Stack was ready, but MySQL 5.1 was still undergoing development. So, release, or hold back?

Ultimately we decided to release. In retrospect, this may not have been the best thing since MySQL 5.1 was still evolving quickly. It's hard to say, since some people were using it. For others, it caused migration issues.

Regardless, for Sun Web Stack 1.4, we coordinated a bit further with our MySQL brethren and collectively decided the best thing was to ship MySQL 5.0. Yes, it's a version regression from what we had in Cool Stack 1.3.1. Cool Stack is still available though, and we don't have any plan to pull it. We'll also be looking to update things going into the next release. If you have any thoughts on this, it'd be great to hear feedback in the comments or on the Sun Web Stack forum

The paths seem different compared to Cool Stack... why were they changed?

For users who weren't using zones, the old approach worked. However, if you were using Solaris zones, or you decided to adopt Solaris Zones after installing into the global zone, then it didn't work so well. It was possible to just install into the non-global zones, but that did require some planning.

At the same time, I know there is a nice simple abstraction in having everything in a common directory. You look in /opt/coolstack and find it all there. The good news is that in the unbundled release, for the most part we kept this abstraction. The only difference is that this release uses /var/opt/ (variable files, like your htdocs) and /etc/opt (configuration files), which will work correctly with zones.

Having said that, I know that there are still those who prefer a zip or tarball style download which lives in a self-contained directory. There are some technical challenges in doing that correctly, but we are evaluating what it would take. If this is something you'd be interested in, we'd like to get some feedback.

Updates coming soon...