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.

A compilation of today's news of interest:

A compilation of today's news of interest:

Here are two quite different uses of OpenDS - which recently Reached 1.0 and is now Commercially Supported.

First as a Directory Service for OpenSolaris - see these two articles by Ludo, Marzen and Marina: Basic Setup and Advanced Configuration. The second is as An Embedded Application: Mark describes in detail how to write a portable Servlet using OpenDS so it can run on a container like GlassFish Server.

A concise compilation of today's news of interest to TheAquarium readers:

TheObservatory has a concise description of the different OpenSolaris (the code base) distributions, from OpenSolaris (the distro) to MartUX mBE - 9 distro's altogether.

The Observatory is a very useful source of news for OpenSolaris it is worth a visit even if you are not an active user.

The new OpenSolaris-branded distribution was launched at CommunityOne (PR, GetIt); together with efforts like OpenSolaris.COM and TheObservatory it is intended to help the users of OpenSolaris complementing the developer-focused OpenSolaris.ORG.

I think will see significant increased adoption of OpenSolaris in the next few months. Other trends that will help are the increased adoption of VirtualBox (home page, vb at TA, LinuxJournal Award), the new IPS package system, and more familiarization with features like ZFS, DTrace and IPS.

Several people in GlassFish have started doing more things with OpenSolaris and we will track them through TA. Here are some useful initial pointers: • Installing OpenSolaris on VB on MacOSX. • Official OS Docs • Amitsaha's IPS Overview and official Getting Started with IPS document. • Alexis' GF v2 on OpenSolaris and official Installing GFv2 from IPS document. • Arun's JRuby on Rails an MySQL on VB

I recently installed VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro and so far it runs very nicely. I think VB is going to become a very interesting solution and I already know of several people putting together useful images, so stay tuned on that front. In the meantime, a couple of recent news: yesterday there was a new VB 1.6.2 release that is mostly a bug fixing release (downloads, change log). VirtualBox works with Many Guest and Host OS; and, from the perspective of Sun, OpenSolaris is particularly interesting to Sun, and here is an article on OpenSolaris on VB.

Added Most BSC entries related to VirtualBox can be found through the virtualbox tag.

Getting the best possible GlassFish integration with operating systems (install, performance, flexibility) is a high priority for us. The work done for Ubuntu and Debian are good illustrations. Of course, as you can imagine, Solaris is no exception.

Jagadesh and Shaline have just posted an entry on using GlassFish in the context of Solaris Trusted Extensions, a seriously ruggedized Solaris install (the entry does a good job explaining what it is).

You can also elect to use GlassFish on the recently released OpenSolaris distro and its online repository (first steps here). Finally, if you're into using Zones (aka containers), this earlier article goes into how to best take advantage of global, sparse, or whole-root Zones.

It's always nice to see others combining various technologies to come up with new and interesting applications. In this case, Natiku has described how to run Project WebSynergy onto the Amazon EC2 Computing Cloud. It runs the OpenSolaris OS. This could easily be farmed out to web startups who want to get a site up and running quickly for very low cost, while retaining the ability to pay more for more CPUs/bandwidth later.

Very cool, very cheap, and very easy!

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!