Sun's LAMP support is assembled from two pieces: the L is from our Linux/GNU Support (see SunSolve entry), while the AMP comes from the GlassFish WebStack, which, in its latest incarnation includes Apache HTTP Server, lighttpd, memcached, MySQL, PHP, Python, Ruby, Squid, Tomcat, GlassFish (v2.1) and Hudson (features).

The inclusion of Hudson is a bit of an opportunistic move (more on that in a bit), the rest comprises a well tested, integrated, optimized, and extended component stack for your new and old Web Apps.

The WebStack can be downloaded here; the bundle includes the WebStack Enterprise Manager, which, unlike the other components, is not free right-to-use but rather is available with an eval license; this is a model like that of the GlassFish Enterprise Manager. The current release supports RHEL, Solaris and OpenSolaris (it is bundled in OpenSolaris); for additional details, check out the Documentation and Discussion Forum.

Check out these posts from the WebStack team:

Last week Kenai went beta, with the usual services in a development hub site plus an additional "connected" angle. Our GF CORBA project is already using its Hg repository but another very interesting angle is the technology mix.

Kenai acheived development agility with reliability by using a combination of our scripting (JRuby/Rails) and enterprise (GlassFish v2, MySQL, OpenSolaris) technologies. These combinations are beginning to pop all over and are one of the key targets of GlassFish, using JRuby (see Nick's Blog site), Groovy (see Glenn's GroovyBlogs), or others. Back to Kenai, check out Tim's Interview with Nick, and some Technical Details on Caching and in Testing/Performance Methodology. Also see Pictures from Austvik, Spotlight from Arun and Lenz's Technology Overview.

Dick Davis (Number 9) is a GlassFish Server fan and also a user of Roller (on GFv2 and on GFv3). He is now adding caching on a 2-node GlassFish cluster and his latest note shows how to set Memcached on Solaris to accomplish this. Check out more posts by Dick on Solaris and on GlassFish. TheAquarium relevant posts are tagged Roller. Added - Also check out Dick's latest Roller Summary.

Sun offers quite a number of training courses, and some of them are even free. Some I noticed this week:

Trond highlights two very interesting free Webinars next week with top speakers (tip): "Highly scalable solutions with MySQL and Memcached" (Wed) and "Designing and Implementing Scalable Applications with Memcached and MySQL" (Thu). Marina points to free Student Courses as part of the resources at the Student Portal. Arun and Daniel mention Sang's latest course on Ruby and Rails. Sang's Java Passion site has many good online courses using the GlassFish Server, including JavaEE, Web Services and EJB.

Sun has many other courses, sometimes it's just a bit hard to find them. For example, the site for online and in classroom courses offered by Sun is http://www.sun.com/training and many of these are related to GlassFish, but a Search for "glassfish" will yield only a few of those.

We are working to fix that last problem, and I try to capture courses I know at GlassFishForBusiness, but what we really need is a full-time librarian... ideally a super one, like Conan the Librarian.

Memcached is the popular distributed cache system (often used with MySQL) that was developed for LiveJournal (Article, Wikipedia, Website). One of many sites using memcached is BSC and Dave has two recent writeups on the topic: The Roller Caching API, and Using Memcached with Roller. And, on this topic, there has been good progress in the Webstack optimizing memcached for Solaris. Check Trond's articles on Configuration, the Latest Release and more. Also don't miss Patrick's Latest release of the Memcached Functions for MySQL.

Memcached is a distributed, in-memory, cache that was popularized by LiveJournal. Memcached has good performance but it runs as a deamon (diagram) and an interesting question is whether local, cooperating, in-memory caches might do better. Greg implemented this approach in ehCache (diagram, Wotif.COM) and recently ran some comparisons that suggest ehCache is much faster.

Greg gave a full report on this topic in TS-6039 at JavaOne but the slides are not yet online. Fortunately he just published a short summary in his blog site (see comparison graph). There was also a micro-session at CommunityDay and I'll let you know when we push the slides to the Virtual GlassFish Day page.