System News for Sun Users - The Blog

NetBeans has evolved considerably since it was acquired by Sun in 1999 and open-sourced in 2000. The NetBeans IDE is an open-source integrated development environment written entirely in Java using the NetBeans Platform.  The NetBeans IDE runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris. NetBeans IDE is open-source and free. NetBeans supports many languages, including C, C++, Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl and JavaScript.

Sun Blogger Kunal, in a recent post lists some of the NetBeans featurs that qualify it to be the “Ultimate Linux IDE“:

Diagrams support:

NetBeans supports UML (Unified Modelling Language) and BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) diagrams.

GUI designer:

NetBeans comes with one of the worlds best interface GUI designers (for Swing), thanks to Project Matisse.

Coding:

NetBeans supports almost all stable SDKs, including Java SE SDK 6 and the new OpenJDK

Testing and tuning:

NetBeans includes a complete quality framework called SQE (Software Quality Environment). It also comes with a performance and memory profiling tool

Enterprise Java and database support:

NetBeans has the industrys most complete support for JavaEE5. It supports various J2EE servers, including Glassfish, SUN J2EE, Web Logic and IBM Web Sphere

Multiple configuration support:

NetBeans supports various project configuration properties

Debugger support:

NetBeans tightly integrates with GDB to provide standard debugging facilities

Editor:

The C/C++ editor supports syntax highlighting, automatic code completion, automatic indentation and formatting (including a choice of formatting styles), bracket matching, code folding and templates. NetBeans IDE can find classes, variables, functions, include directives, derived classes, and more.

NetBeans vs Eclipse:

Kumal provides a table of features to compare NetBeans and Eclipse

See Also

NetBeans wikipedia enrtry

http://www.netbeans.org

NetBeans 6.1 Press Release from Sun

The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a “storage for the Internet”.  A web services interface can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. The S3 feature set includes:

• Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited.
• Each object is stored in a bucket and retrieved via a unique, developer-assigned key.
• A bucket can be located in the United States or in Europe. All objects within the bucket will be stored in the bucket’s location, but the objects can be accessed from anywhere.
• Authentication mechanisms are provided to ensure that data is kept secure from unauthorized access. Objects can be made private or public, and rights can be granted to specific users.
• Uses standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit.
• Built to be flexible so that protocol or functional layers can easily be added.  Default download protocol is HTTP.  A BitTorrent(TM) protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution.  Additional interfaces will be added in the future.
• Reliability backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement.

There is a fee for storage (15c per GB=month in the US) and a fee for data transferred  in (10c per GB) and out (starting at  17c per GB and going down with volume). There is also a small fee for PUT, POST, GET and LIST requests.

Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. To use Amazon EC2:

• Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing your applications, libraries, data and associated configuration settings. Or use pre-configured, templated images to get up and running immediately.
• Upload the AMI into Amazon S3. Amazon EC2 provides tools that make storing the AMI simple. Amazon S3 provides a safe, reliable and fast repository to store your images.
• Use Amazon EC2 web service to configure security and network access.
• Start, terminate, and monitor as many instances of your AMI as needed, using the web service APIs.
• Pay only for the resources that you actually consume, like instance-hours or data transfer.

OpenSolaris on ECS

Sun  and Amazon are collaborating to offer OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2. The two supported releases are OpenSolaris OS 2008.05 and Solaris Express Community Edition.

Saving and Restoring ZFS Snapshots to and from Amazon S3

Sean O’Dell has posted a blog entry that shows how to use ZFS snapshots to “save and restore filesystems from one Solaris EC2 instance to another.”

A new  “McNealy Minute” audio podcast features Scott McNealy talking with Mike Zafirovski, President & CEO of Nortel, on

“… the future of education, and how Sun, Nortel and others are working together to eliminate the digital divide by providing better access to knowledge through network technology, open systems and sharing.”

Sun has a long history in providing service to the education space and Scott is involved with Curricki, which was spun out of Sun.

Nortel is a leading innovator in the communications space. They invest their philanthropic activities in a program called LearniT:

Nortel LearniT is an initiative of Nortel Community Relations to prepare teachers, students, and learners of all ages to develop 21st century skills that will provide a basis for their ongoing engagement in learning and personal achievement

Scott calls this NASA approved program,  “Rock science - Online”. Mike says he would like LearniT to reach as many teachers and students as possible and he is excited about working with Scott and Curricki to put those assest together and drive adoption.

Scott and Mike go on to discuss how  LearniT and Curricki will work together and why it makes sense for corporations like Sun and Nortel to invest in such initiavites.

ZDnet columnist Paul Murphy looks at the cost of acquiring 1000 desk top systems in a recent blog post, “Costing Sun Ray vs Wintel“. He compares the Sun Ray thin client to a popular low-cost Dell desk top and concludes that the hardware costs are lower for the Sun Ray solution.

However, the big savings are in the lower costs of administration and the lower power consumption (8 watts + screen for Sun Ray vs 180 watts + screen for Dell Optiflex 755).

In May, 2008, VMware unveiled a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) platform for remote users who want to use VDI with Sun Ray Software and virtual display clients. The new integrated desktop solution is ideal for wide area networks (WANs) and uses Sun’s Appliance Link Protocol (ALP), which VMware and Sun report outperforms other display protocols in delivering virtual desktops in a WAN deployment with high latency and in delivering consistently better performance than competing display protocols

Scott McNealy. in top form, delivered a 45-talk this month to a group of entrepreneurs in the UK.

He shared some his personal experiences in staring Sun Microsystems and some insights into his management philosophy.

Network.com, Sun’s collection of grid-enabled online applications available on a pay-per-use basis, along with the free open source 3D content creation suite Blender were selected by BBC World News as one of the best cloud applications available:

“Sun’s data centres are available for hire by the hour to power on-demand cloud services. Used mainly for processing scientific data, the servers can also be used for rendering animations via the open source Blender 3D software on the desktop.”

Network.com and Blender 3D recently made headlines as the technologies teamed up for the 3D animated movie “Big Buck Bunny.” Network.com acted as a web hosting location for the online comedy created using Blender 3D.

If you’re interested in learning more about COMSTAR, the OpenSolaris Project COmmon Multiprotocol SCSI TARget, then take 10 minutes of your time to watch a screencast demonstration conducted by Sun expert Sumit Gupta who walks viewers through the basic steps of setting up a Solaris host as a fibre channel storage array using COMSTAR and ZFS.

The OpenSolaris Web site also has a video of Gupta presenting COMSTAR at SNIA SDC and Sun engineers presenting COMSTAR at SNW.

Visit the COMSTAR Videos page for all three.

The International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) 2008 is currently underway in Dresden, Germany. Numerous announcements from Sun have been made including:

• the new Sun Blade X6450 Server Module powered by four high-performance dual-or-quad core Intel Xeon processor 7300 series. When integrated into the Sun Constellation System, this new Sun Blade x64 system delivers more than seven TFlops of peak performance per fully populated Sun Blade 6048 chassis, up to 71% more compute cores and 50% more memory capacity than competing blade servers.

• additions to the Sun Constellation System, such as the Sun Datacenter Switch 3×24 (a smaller version of the Sun Datacenter Switch 3456), which features 72 DDR 4X Infiniband ports

Video presentations from the conference and other broadcast media on Sun’s newest HPC solutions are posted on the Sun HPC Community Portal so readers can find out about the latest information as its announced.

Also, visit the ISC 2008 Media Kit Web page hosted on Sun’s site for more detailed information on the company’s newest HPC products and solutions.

Solaris Containers or Zones are lightweight virtual Solaris instances similar to a full Solaris OS instance but which share a single Solaris kernel. They are easy to provision, require only a small amount of incremental disk space, and can be rebooted as needed in seconds. Containers can also be cloned, detached, moved and reattached. In a blog by Michael O’Connor, he shares the advantages of combining multiple applications onto a single server using lightweight Solaris Containers versus hypervisors.

In a follow-up entry, he explains that in some rare cases, applications are unable to run in a local or non-global zone and should go through a qualification process to identify potential installation or runtime issues, especially if root permission is needed to install or run the application.

“Local zones operate with a reduced set of process privileges relative to the global zone. As a result, all processes running in a non-global zone also have reduced privilege and certain system calls may return errors,” O’Connor writes. “Again, 99% of applications will run just fine in non-global zones but it pays to take the time to fully qualify new or migrating services before attempting a production deployment.”

Resources for ISVs and system administrators interested in taking a more cautious entry into Solaris Zones:

• Bringing your Application into the Zone
• Qualification Best Practices for Application Support in Non-Global Zones
• System Administration Guide: Solaris Containers-Resource Management and Solaris Zones
• Zones and Containers FAQ at OpenSolaris.org
• Virtualization Blueprints at wikis.sun.com

Cool Stack Version 1.3 is now available for download and offers multiple component upgrades as well as the following new additions:

- Python 2.5.2
- nginx 0.6.31
- libxslt 1.1.22
- fontconfig 2.4.2
- mod_security apache 2.5.3
- mod_python 3.3.1
- mod_ruby 1.2.6
- mod_dtrace 0.3a
- memcache php extension 2.2.3
- xdebug php extension 2.0.3
- tcpwrap php extension 1.0
- perl Compress::Zlib
- mysql ruby gems 2.7
- postgres ruby gem 0.7.1

Significant changes have been made to the Ruby package. According to a senior staff engineer in the Performance & Application Engineering Group, “It should also be easy to install any new gem that requires native compilation using gcc - this should just work out of the box.” Performance enhancements for Ruby have shown a 20-30 percent improvement, with SPARC-specific patches improving performance another 8-15 percent, he writes.

See Cool Stack 1.3 documentation and Changelog for more details.