OpenSolaris from the get go has always been about attracting more developers to Solaris.
Sun is now improving on that promise with the release of Solaris Express, Developer Edition, a new open source AMP
(Apache/MySQL/Perl or PHP) stack for OpenSolaris and new support programs
for developers to get started using OpenSolaris. The new efforts
are part of Sun’s goal to recapture developer talent and imagination and
direct it towards innovating on Solaris.
“We wanted to make it easier for developers to get up and running,” Dan Roberts director of developer tools marketing at Sun, told internetnews.com.
To that end Sun is bundling the latest hardware drivers for sound, video and
network equipment as well as including developer tools and run times to
build applications.
Solaris Express Developer Edition is not the first version of a Solaris
Express product from Sun. Sun already has a Solaris Express and Solaris
Express Community Edition available. Robert explained that Developer Edition
is different from the other versions in that it benefit from more quality
assurance and stability.
“In the community release you get weekly builds that are constantly
changing. The focus for developer edition is more of a quarterly release
model with more stability and a level of developer support that is
available, which offers a more stable platform.”
Sun will be making Solaris Express Developer Edition available as a freely
downloadable ISO image
Developers will benefit from a Solaris tuned AMP (Apache/MySQL/Perl/PHP)
stack as well as a broad set of tools to help developers build
applications that run on Solaris.
“We are building out an open source infrastructure and allowing developers
to build, tune and tweak at run time to ensure that they are maximizing
performance in the system and getting the most utilization,” Roberts said.
Though the Developer release includes items designed to make development
easier for developers of dynamic languages such as PHP and Ruby, Roberts
admitted that there is still something missing.
“In a broad sense there are no good tools available yet for dynamic
languages from the standpoint of a Netbeans like IDE,” Roberts said. “This
is a general problem, even though ActiveState and Zend have some tools, most developers doing Ruby on Rails or PHP are using more core editors .”
Though in Roberts view there aren’t such industry tools yet, Sun is working
on the problem.
“This is actually an area that sun is investing heavily so that Netbeans can
provide first class development capabilities for things like Javascript and
Ruby on Rails and other languages.”
According to Tom Goguen, vice president, Solaris software at Sun the Developer Edition
release is part of Sun’s concerted effort to recapture the imagination of
developers world wide and get them back to Solaris.
There isn’t necessarily a straight line between what happens in OpenSolaris
and what may eventually become Solaris 11 either.
“People who are using OpenSolaris are using technology that may be in a
future version of Solaris 10 or technology that may show up in subsequent
releases of Solaris,” Goguen said.
Update 3 of Solaris 10 was released
in December. Such technology innovations as ZFS which entered Solaris 10 at
update
2, first appeared in OpenSolaris.
Though OpenSolaris can be a proving ground for future Solaris features, when
Solaris 11 will be released isn’t being made public, yet.
“I can’t commit to a date or even functionality that is related to a Solaris
next release,” Goguen said. “Frankly most customers today are looking at
migrations to Solaris 10.”
“Those that want to get on the bleeding edge — that’s what OpenSolaris is
for.”
