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

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.

Spend 60 minutes listening to  Russ Castronovo, (Director, Social and New Media, Sun Microsystems), interviewing Michael Cornwell, Sun manager of flash memory technology. Learn how Sun will leverage this new, disruptive technology to create a new storage architecture.

Michael joined Sun from Apple where he was involved with disk subsystems and innovatve flash based products such as the iPods.

This was a live event and Russ asks questions  submitted from the audience. 

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.

In a Sun BigAdmin community-submitted tech tip by Victor Feng, readers are treated to some helpful hints they may need when setting up resource control for Zones in the Solaris 10 08/07, which was the first version that offered this control directly to users.

Tips passed along by Feng:

- Use cpu-shares to control zone computing resources.

- The swap property of capped-memory is virtual swap space, not physical swap space.

- A zone sometimes consumes more physical memory than the maximum limit.

For each of the above mentioned hints, Feng provides information and coding to make these aspects of zones work more effectively.

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

The Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) is a best practice blueprint based on proven Oracle high-availability technologies and recommendations. Learn how to optimize an MAA cofiguration in an Oracle White Paper that explains how to transition an Oracle E-Business Suite application to an MAA configuration on the Solaris Operating System

The white paper describes how to transition from Oracle E-Business Suite 11.5.10.2 running a single instance on Oracle Database 10g Release 2 to a clustered system. The configuration specifically consists of the Business Suite running on two nodes with Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC), Oracle Flashback, Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM), Oracle Clusterware, Solaris Cluster software and a disaster recovery site leveraging Oracle Data Guard. Storage technologies include Sun StorageTek Network Attached Storage (NAS), Sun StorageTek Fibre Channel RAID systems, and Sun StorageTek tape and tape automation systems. Solaris Clusters software, which works well with Oracle Clusterware for Oracle RAC deployments, also is used.

Application downtime was limited to five minutes for the transition to MAA.

See the 72-page white paper, “Transitioning Oracle E-Business Suite to the Maximum Availability Architecture on the Solaris Operating System” for more.

Learn more about Oracle MAA.

Find out how to optimize OpenSolaris on Intel Xeon processors in a video clip series hosted by Software Engineering Manager David Stewart, who is part of the Open Source Technology Center at Intel.

So far, Stewart has three video clips posted on YouTube, each of which run a little over five minutes:

Episode 1: “Why Intel and OpenSolaris?”

Episode 2: “Power Utilization”

Episode 3: “Getting Instant Performance Boosts”

OpenSolaris Build 90 allows multiple products, protocols and device types to be supported by any Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS)-based server with a common framework - COMSTAR or the COmmon Multiprotocol SCSI TARget.

This OpenSolaris project provides a software framework enabling any OpenSolaris host to be turned into a SCSI target storage device, which can be accessed over the network by initiator hosts. With COMSTAR, a SCSI target subsystem is broken down into independent functional modules that are then integrated by the SCSI Target Mode Framework (STMF).

COMSTAR’s framework allows for all SCSI device types (tape, disk, SES, etc.) connected to any transport (Fibre Channel, iSCSI, iSER, SAS, FCoE, etc.) with concurrent access to all LUNs (Logical Unit Numbers) and a single point of management.

“A key objective of COMSTAR is to provide a simple framework for users to add transport protocols and device types to build new block storage devices,” blogs Sun’s Scott Tracy. “This allows any block storage device to be built from one common framework. No other commercially available operating system allows this type of flexibility or coordination.”

During this past May’s CommunityOne gathering, Sun Engineering Manager Peter Buckingham gave a presentation on COMSTAR that includes instructions on creating a multiprotocol server using ZFS to create a file share, installing COMSTAR and using COMSTAR to create a FC target. Visit the Storage Stop blog to view the video.