Another sweep across the several dozen browser tabs I’ve built up in recent weeks, thinking “worth writing about”. As I was building this up, I noticed that almost everything was Sun-related, so I focused on that stuff. Yep, my interests are conflicted all right, but I think it’s interesting stuff.
Solaris Stuff · Check out the OpenSolaris Ruby On Rails 2 AMI, where AMI means a preconfigured Amazon EC2 instance. (There are other Solaris AMIs too.) I’m still not sure what the platform-as-a-service sweet spot is, we just have to keep trying different things until we get it.
Speaking of Solaris, obviously I’m an OpenSolaris fan, but I’ve always liked Nexenta too, and I’m not the only one; see Anil Gulecha’s Nexenta: Ubuntu Server with ZFS goodness.
The big deal about Nexenta is that it uses Debian’s “apt” package management system. The OpenSolaris guys decided to write their own, called IPS. Check out Package Management Task Tables, a detailed line-by-line comparison of IPS and apt.
On a related note, and for once not all-Sun, check out Don MacAskill from SmugMug: Hot technologies I care about - Sep ’08. And staying with Don and getting back to Sun tech: Success with OpenSolaris + ZFS + MySQL in production! He says “Success” but he’s got some real gripes too, most of which I share.
Web Stuff · Back at OSCON, I got to do the announcement of the “Sun Web Stack”. Here’s a (much-needed, IMHO) Getting Started with the Sun Web Stack.
Further news along REST-is-the-future lines: Dave Johnson offers Proposal: Finalize Web Services APIs, about further enriching OpenSocial.
GUI You Say? · Leaving the Web and casting a rare (for this blog) glance at compiled UIs, drop by IBM and read James Britt on Cross-platform development with JRuby and Swing. I think it’s obvious that Java probably isn’t the best programming language for building Swing apps. This isn’t just theory, people are really starting to do it.
In the End, It’s Just Data · Enough about development, let’s talk data, office data, XML data. Here are two ODF-related pieces from Simon Phipps: ODF Going Global is straight reportage on the international scene, way different from my Norteamericano reality. OpenOffice.org and archiving isn’t reportage, it’s first-rate thinking on the thorny issues around electronic document archival. Which is a problem that is only getting bigger and hotter all the time.
Times are Tough · Yep, but this is still an interesting place to work.
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Mike Hayes (Oct 20 2008, at 01:16)
In relation to JRuby and Swing, Griffon seems to be worth a look too - http://groovy.codehaus.org/Griffon
It's like Grails for the Desktop and though still evolving, it is intriguing.
Geertans blog has numerous useful articles on Griffon, but this is an good jumping off point -
http://blogs.sun.com/geertjan/entry/griffon_identifying_the_dark_underbelly
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