[This is one of four pieces of Sun news from last week; I actually got to make the announcements at OSCON but was too busy to blog]. The Sun Web Stack, shipping later this year, is an agglomeration of Web stuff (“Formerly known as CoolStack, also known as LAMP/SAMP”), and a fully-supported Sun product on both Solaris and GNU/Linux. Read on for details and discussion; this raises some interesting issues.
What’s In the Box? · This list of versions is approximate, but a pretty good guess:
Apache HTTP server version 2.2.8.
Apache modules (e.g. mod_jdk).
Memcached 1.2.5 (with large page support).
MySQL (Community 5.1).
lighttpd 1.4.18.
Tomcat 6.0.16.
PHP 5.2.5 (maybe 5.2.6).
Ruby 1.8.6, Rails 1.2.3, gem 0.9.0, Mongrel 1.0.1, fcgi, RedCloth, readline.
Perl 5.8.8 and extensions.
Squid 2.16.x.
When I showed the list, someone in the room said “WTF, no Python!?!?” and the product guy there said “Oops, yep, it’ll be there.”
Some proportion of these (quite a few off the top, and increasing with each release) will be DTrace-probe-equipped.
Linux, You Say? · Whether you say “Linux” or “GNU/Linux”, that’s a seriously under-defined term. The fact is, it’ll be supported on a fixed and small list of distros, maybe only one out of the gate. The cost of training Sun’s global support org, per distro, is pretty fierce. Stand by for details.
Who Needs It? · Well, speaking as a developer, I don’t for my own desktop. I’d just as soon download Edge Rails and random Gems and arbitrary Apache modules. But when the time comes to put it into production, that’s a different story. Earlier this year, I was talking to a major airline in the middle of America, preaching about the productivity gains you can get with Rails and PHP and friends.
One of the senior IT guys looked me in the eye and said “Well, yeah, sounds good. But it ain’t going into production until I have a vendor throat to choke.” Now he does.
Is this going to be a big deal? Beats me, but it’s totally worth trying.
Contributions
· Technology (90 fragments)
· · Open Source (82 more)
· · Web (396 more)
· Business (126 fragments)
· · Sun (63 more)
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: John Cowan (Jul 28 2008, at 16:21)
Y'know, I hear an awful lot of that, how OSS is no good because there's no vendor to sue (or kill).
Maybe you vendors should try to create a brave new world in which your customers don't have such murderous thoughts?
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From: Scot (Jul 29 2008, at 08:03)
I was thinking "WTF - No Java?", until I looked closely and saw mod_jdk and Tomcat. I guess Java is such a given that it doesn't deserve special attention.
Still, surprised not to see Glassfish in the list.
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From: Wes Felter (Jul 29 2008, at 10:44)
SAMP: Why isn't this just built into Solaris/OpenSolaris?
LAMP: Don't the distros already include all these pieces? This sounds like a repeat of Ximian. Can't you choke Red Hat?
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From: Tim (Jul 29 2008, at 10:55)
Wes: Yeah, this stuff either comes with, or is trivially downloadable, in either Linux or Solaris. The news is that you can get a support contract on it.
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From: tomd (Jul 29 2008, at 12:33)
My initial reaction was "wtf, no Postgres?". Has Sun given up any promotion of the better open source rdbms?
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From: Wes Felter (Jul 29 2008, at 13:21)
Doesn't an OS support contract also cover the AMP that is included with the OS? Are there customers who want to buy OS support from one vendor and AMP support from another vendor, or buy AMP support without OS support?
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From: Bilgehan Maraş (Jul 29 2008, at 13:28)
Why not Glassfish V3 instead of Tomcat?
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From: Bilgehan Maraş (Jul 29 2008, at 14:32)
I wondered why not Glassfish instead of Tomcat but then i thought that smooth integration with Apache or Lighthttpd is the reason. Glassfish has its own web server based on Grizzly.
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