ahlawat.net

During the last two weeks or so I have been trying to carefully evaluate what the best platform is run an enterprise java app. I am not even going to consider windows. During my research on the internet I came across this article.

I have worked with Solaris off and on - both on work and also when I was at school - at Cornell our entire packet switched networks class lab was completely in C and solaris, but I have never really liked it that much - I just prefer linux. However the differences between the file IO and numeric computation was considerable. (possibly because of the differences between EXT3 and ZFS). It intrigued  me enough to try to run open solaris. So I downloaded the iso from the opensolaris and installed it as a virtual box vm. The default version, like ubuntu started as live CD from where the user has an option to install it. The installation was quick and easy - no issues at all. I logged in and was very quickly up and running with javac, ant, mvn, groovy etc. No issues at all - then I went to the idea website to get a version of the IDE and guess what - they don’t support solaris - out of hope I downladed the linux version and it did not work.

Of course eclipse has been recently ported over to opensolaris and there is net beans.

The package manager sucks though - it downloads stuff one at a time? I liked that there was a default AMP package that installed PHP, Apache and MySql so you had the basics of a web server in place. Installing your own stuff as a service is radically different from linux. The default init.d scripts have been deprecated in favor of the service manager facility. Its seems to be very well thought out - moving services between run levels - auto restart of services gone bad etc. are awesome features but there is a lot of admin to do here. Linux is just a heck of a lot easier - you can easily find init.d scripts and if you are using centos managing run levels and services using the chkconfig command is too simpile. Sample scripts for svcadm are hard to find and frankly administering solaris is not what interested me most so I never bothered with it too much.

All in all would I ever develop on opensolaris - probably not because the tooling support sucks, some of my favorite python libraries might not install on solaris. Would I use it in as a production server - POSSIBLY .. if I find that my language performs faster on solaris - which the bench mark seems to suggest and once I get around the initial installing as a service, monitoring bits. Other people seem to think that open solaris is too slow - I never benchmarked high network or file IO but even working on VM seemed not that bad - the unizpping and moving around copying stuff seemed to be reasonable for a VM. I have a mixed feeling about it - hopefully when I start using it more I might have more to say. For now linux it is.