You may have seen Jonathan's note on OpenSolaris, MySQL and GlassFish being available on Amazon EC2. Details on the OpenSolaris portion are available at the EC2 Blog (Welcome, Launch and New Limits), at Dileep's Blog and at the EC2@Sun and OS@EC2 sites. For MySQL check the MySQL@EC2 site.

I know that Homer worked on the GlassFish AIM AMI but it all happened right before JavaOne and I didn't have time to check more. He told me he is writing a note on it, and I'll spotlight it when it is ready.

And thanks to Charles for some of the Links.

Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE), the Sun OpenSolaris-based distribution for Solaris, Java, and Web 2.0 developers has a new release out: 1/08. Ludo has a post about the integrated web stack as well as a 10-minute screencast. After giving SMF privileges for Apache/mySQL servers, Ludo shows how the user can use a very simple graphical tool to start/stop and configure services. He also walks you through a small PHP/jMaki/Ajax pre-packaged demo with a mySQL backend. He finally uses NetBeans' PHP support and auto-registering of the AMP-stack to author and debug a simple PHP application. Pretty slick!

SXDE also comes with the NetBeans 6/GlassFish v2 pre-configured bundle and if you're using the VMWare image, I would recommend upgrading the amount of memory from 512 to 2Gb. And in case you're wondering, the VMWare image password for root is SXDE (see also the FAQ).

Check out also Ludo's previous interview on GlassFish tooling.

The reaction to Sun's Intended Acquisition of MySQL ( Jonathan's blog, Video) is very positive at the end of this first day. Some of the references are:

• Traditional Press - NetworkWorld, Forbes, Guardian, The Register, ComputerWorld, InformationWeek, NY Times, WSJ, PC World, CNet News and many more. • Analysts and Bloggers - O'Reilly, Kaj, Simon, Dana Gardner, ReadWriteWeb, Open Source Solutions, Alex Fletcher, Rod Johnson and many more, including uncountable Entries @ BSC • Discussions - TheServerSide ([1], [2], [3]), Slashdot,

I'll confess I'm slightly (but very pleasantly) surprised at the percentage of positive reactions this soon after the announcement. Also at the number of places where GlassFish is mentioned and how often the deal is compared favorably to Oracle's Acquisition of BEA.

On a personal note, I'm typing this from Orlando where MySQL has an all-employee meeting. Several of us flew here Tuesday evening for today's announcement and to talk with people. We had already met several individuals while preparing for the deal but this is a great opportunity to meet many more folks.

I'm enjoying the visit a lot; the cultures of the two companies are very compatible and yet we can learn a lot from each other. One area that MySQL does better is dealing with "isolated" employees; MySQL is geographically very distributed and there is not much a sense of "HQ" vs "non-HQ" - everybody is in a more equal footing than at Sun. I think the deal is going to work very well at many levels.

PS. At left is Sakila, the mascot of MySQL. She is a dolphin, not a fish :-)

Virtualization is really hot now. We recently mentioned about Using LDOMs to partition a T2-based system. This week's annoncement of Solaris 10 8/07 includes New Zones Features including BrandZ Zones. The first BrandZ (lX) allows Running Linux Apps on Solaris (see earlier news). A new announcement is Project Etude which enables Solaris 8 Apps running as guests on a Solaris 10 host; see Marc's Business Overview and Dan's Technical Overview. Also see these reviews at Dr. Dobb's, The Register and EnterpriseLinux.

Added: Also see the announcement about Windows and Solaris virtualization.

I discovered Number 9 when Dick first gave GlassFish a try on a Solaris Zone. It worked but his initial evaluation was a "bit guarded"... I still won’t be surprised to find it floating upside down tomorrow. And, 45 days after that initial post... the fish is still not dead!

Since his original post, Dick has written about how to use GlassFish with DTrace, Service Management Facility (SMF(5)). His latest post explains how to deploy Roller on it.

All Number 9 entries are very clear and easy to read. They are even nicely formatted, which is not always the case for many bloggers. Check them out!

Time to act! We told you to reserve May 7th, 2007 and gave you Extra Warnings. The registration for GlassFish Day is now open: go to the new Community One page and register for free before it fills up.

There will be multiple tracks, covering GlassFish, OpenSolaris, NetBeans, OpenJDK, Web 2.0, and more. Some details are still changing: here is the latest version of the GlassFish Track.

The latest distribution of OpenSolaris is Solaris Express, Developer Edition. This free distribution for the x86 architecture is intended to rev quickly and to provide the latest tools and runtimes for developers. Check this review from The Register NetBeans and GlassFish v1 are part of the Solaris Express and Sreeni's latest writeup describes how to go about downloading the pieces to create a DVD image, booting from it and then running it.

That makes 3 FOSS distros including GlassFish v1: Solaris Express, Belenix and Ubuntu's Feisty Fawn. It might be fun to predict how many we will have by the end of 2007...

GlassFish is now in the BeneliX 0.5.1 distribution. BeneliX is an OpenSolaris Distribution with a Live CD (runs directly off the CD, or the USB drive, or installed on your hard disk) with additional FOSS packages. There is now a DVD distribution that includes GlassFish, OpenOffice, NetBeans and more. BeleniX news are here. The download page is here and it includes the LiveCD and DVD and also bitTorrent distributions. Thanks to Joe and Moinak for the tip.

The FOSS.IN 2006 conference starts tomorrow in Bangalore and it looks really good. Check out the Schedule, which includes presentations on GlassFish, Portal, OpenSSO, OpenJDK, OpenSolaris, NetBeans, OpenOffice, Derby and much more. More perspectives from Sahoo, Sivakumar, Moinak, Joe, Madhu and Pratibha.

I think I need to start planning to attend next year :-)

Planet OpenSolaris is live and it looks good. Other related Planet aggregators are Planet NetBeans and PlanetJDK.

Given the continuous growth of the communities covered here, we will have to create some Planet aggregator to complement TheAquarium. We need to decide how to link this to the different communities; in my TODO list for December.

I really enjoy the synergies that are emerging across our different Open Source Communities: on Friday James announced that Doc.java.sun.com now includes Java EE (and the site runs on GlassFish), and SteveL reported on a very smooth experiment Running OpenGrok on GlassFish as part of exploring moving all of OpenSolaris.ORG to GlassFish. All good example of synergies... or of Sun following the principle of Eat One's Own Dog Food.

BTW, do you know that dogs bark differently in different languages? For example, in spanish they say "guau, guau", and in english "woof, woof", and these sound very differently; and so do roosters... I looked around a bit and found this page. Enjoy!

OpenGrok is a fast and user-friendly multi-lingual search and cross-reference tool that is used by the OpenSolaris team. OpenGrok first grinds through the sources to create the data repository; the program itself is written in java and uses Exuberant Ctags. The result is then browsed through a Java Web App that runs in a container like GlassFish (or Tomcat), and Shawn reports positively on his Experience using OpenGrok on GlassFish.

I think it would be interesting to try to combine the features of OpenGrok with those of Sorcerer. Since Sorcerer uses the JavaC Tree API, the information is more accurate, but OpenGrok has more features (like full text search) and is multi-lingual.

Kazem has a nice cartoon entry of GlassFish as Atlas. Many more cartoons, on many topics, at Kazem's blog site. Those I liked on software include fish friends, also on GlassFish, and kiddo, on OpenSolaris, and... Kazem has a whole collection on bugs, including nightmare of complexity bug, the tragedy of bugglet, reincarnating bug, forget Java, bugus ancestrus, the integrity of a bug, trusting a bug, young bug, and more...