[digital:meditation]

Overall insight of this day: If wanting to use OpenSolaris on a daily basis, I need more disk space; 12 GB isn’t just enough so far…

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The second day of my “working-with-opensolaris” week mainly happened to be a day of almost undisturbed / uninterrupted work, not really reminding me that I am working with a different environment right now, just making me stumble across a few minor things I had to deal with but no “real” problems…

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Well, what do you know… Time has passed rather quickly it seems ever since I dealt with OpenSolaris here for the first time, and by now, the first “official” release, 2008.05, is available for you to be downloaded or ordered for free, waiting for you to get it started. And, which possibly comes as no surprise, all of a sudden the web is rapidly filling with all sorts of comments, reviews and “tests” of what might turn out to be the new incarnation of the Solaris operating system one day… Overally, given the fact that OS 2008.05 initially comes as an easily installable Live CD, one is tempted to actually go for a “quick-shot” installation, at very best using some virtualization application like VirtualBox, to then get along with a quick write-up on virtually anything to be discovered in just five minutes of playing around with the OS before attention span has found its end and some other shiny new toy is begging for attention. Given that this hardly is a good and/or meaningful way to making a sane judgement, this time I wanted to try something different: Given someone like me (who has been a Free Software supporter and GNU/Linux enthusiast for the last twelve years at the very least) spends a week doing productive work with a tool next to unfamiliar, what would eventually happen?

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“All operating systems include stuff you’ll never use. For example, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS includes an easy uninstall feature.
We know - completely redundant. Ubuntu 8.04 LTS for desktops - you’ll never go back.”

8.04 “Hardy Heron”, the latest version of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, has been released this week, in short sequence as a server version (supported to 2013) and a desktop distribution (supported to 2011), being the Long Term Support version to follow 6.06 “Dapper Drake” which (at least in our professional infrastructure) has proven to be an incredibly stable and maintaineable platform suiting all our needs. And, looking at it closely, it is obvious that 8.04 has seen an amazing load of work compared to its predecessors, seen both in overall stability, performance as well as in “small” details like the customized Firefox starting page or, as quoted above, a pretty cool marketing / product launch campaign which feels in a refreshing way ironic compared to what other companies tend to do getting their new releases out. Along with Ubuntu itself, there also are new releases of Kubuntu (offered as a “stable” version that comes with KDE 3.5 as well as a “bleeding-edge” version including the infamous new KDE 4), the education / classroom distribution Edubuntu and, of course, my personal favorite Xubuntu, including the lightweight XFCE desktop environment, and being great despite the fact that the default backgrounds in GDM and on the desktop itself just painfully suck. ;) Overally, I have been with Xubuntu 8.04 already for quite a few months, and the last few weeks it has turned out to be a stable and pretty usable machine ready for everyday use, addressing a few issues I had to manually deal with in earlier versions (like using the dual-screen setup on my notebook).

Asides this, however, I am whole-heartedly amazed to see Ubuntu turning into something I haven’t seen that often in GNU/Linux community the last twelve years: It seems to be a distribution which gets more and more approved by both community and companies / commercial providers. Maybe the “open” nature of Ubuntu and the fact that there are predictable, long-term supported releases is something that pays off in the end to help this distribution gaining acceptance all around, becoming a “real” all-purpose (including desktop usage) distribution without throwing away most if not all of the GNU ideas.

And, another thing notable to me, being a Java developer: Ubuntu 8.04 seems the first GNU/Linux distribution so far that includes a fully-fledged set of tools in its package repository:


[kr@n428 9:13:11] ~> apt-cache policy openjdk-6-jdk sun-java6-jdk glassfishv2 netbeans
openjdk-6-jdk:
Installiert:(keine)
Mögliche Pakete:6b09-0ubuntu2
Versions-Tabelle:
6b09-0ubuntu2 0
500 http://archive.ubuntu.com hardy/universe Packages
sun-java6-jdk:
Installiert:(keine)
Mögliche Pakete:6-06-0ubuntu1
Versions-Tabelle:
6-06-0ubuntu1 0
500 http://archive.ubuntu.com hardy/multiverse Packages
glassfishv2:
Installiert:(keine)
Mögliche Pakete:2.0.1-0ubuntu5
Versions-Tabelle:
2.0.1-0ubuntu5 0
500 http://archive.ubuntu.com hardy/multiverse Packages
netbeans:
Installiert:(keine)
Mögliche Pakete:6.0.1-0ubuntu2
Versions-Tabelle:
6.0.1-0ubuntu2 0
500 http://archive.ubuntu.com hardy/universe Packages

So, we do have both OpenJDK and Sun’s “regular” Java SDK in its recent versions, along with the current version of the open-source Glassfish application server (V2u1, at least until Monday, April 28, it seems…), and the recent stable version of the NetBeans IDE, so far my favorite Java/all-purpose development environment. Honestly, installing any of these applications using the “vanilla” installer without relying upon apt and the package repository ain’t that much more difficult, but at least this way getting started doing serious work in Ubuntu 8.04 is easier than ever before, and, considering the idea that Glassfish on Ubuntu 8.04 even might become a configuration officially supportable by Sun, this also might grow the acceptance of Hardy Heron as a server distribution compared to, say, RedHat or SuSE Enterprise Linux. Now I (a) wonder whether the packaging folks will be up to keep packages current when, in example, NetBeans 6.1 is about to be released soon, and (b) whether, talking especially about the Java and integration thing, Sun and the OpenSolaris folks are likely to get (Open)Solaris distributions on par with Ubuntu also in terms of desktop usage and package installation / update procedure, or whether Solaris is rather left for the server usage while Sun folks do focus on supporting Ubuntu as main desktop system environment. Let’s see what will happen…

Let’s get it straight: Most of the time, I hate dealing with content management systems in my professional environment, as so far I haven’t found the right solution to that: Either they don’t team up that well with the rest of our (Java / tomcat based) environment (there’s a vast load of rather powerful PHP based content management solutions out there…) and/or take ages to get set up and started with and/or are seemingly way too “heavy” to carry a few simple pages just for the sake of having an easily accessible management / editing facility. The last thing on that I did so far was installing OpenCMS (astoundingly powerful, for sure), which I quickly and quietly discarded in favor of a simple, “home-grown” solution based on Spring, servlets and JSPs. Though this works reasonably well, it always tends to be tedious once these sites are supposed to be maintained, content needs to be added, things want to be changed, … . So, starting the search all over again.

However, for now I am pretty sure to have found a solution that could end this search - MeshCMS definitely is the best Java based content management solution I have tried so far. The list of features is pretty close to what I need/want:

• Installation is as easy as dumping meshcms.war to tomcats webapp folder and let things happen.
• MeshCMS is fully file-based, allowing for editing content (located by then in sub-folders in webapps/meshcms/), inserting images, … using arbitrary file-editing tools, as well as eliminating the need to throw in an RDBMS server (usually that’s not an issue given free options like postgresql, but in some cases the effort of setting up, maintaining, backing up the DB is just not worth it).
• Theme creation surely is a breeze: On one side, talking about the theme content this is way less “rocket science” compared to other CMS and something easily done by anyone who knows how to deal with JSPs and CSS. On the other side, the structure itself is rather simple and easy to be maintained - create a subfolder in themes, dump your files there and you’re done.
• The administration environment, file manager and friends are lean, reasonably fast and usable without having to deal with a learning curve too steep - a perfect system for any situation in which you’d like lesser experienced users to deal with content of your site.

Overally, diving into it and moving our current web sites theme there took me less than five minutes. Let’s see how the next steps will look like…

Oh yeah, time passes quickly… Seems it was only yesterday to deal with the prerelease builds of NetBeans 6.0, by now things are already “beta” once again, steadily heading for the 6.1 release supposed to be released in late April 2008. One might wonder whether, just less than five months after releasing a stable 6.0 version, time’s right for a new “stable release” already, but, looking at the current pre-release builds, I’d say it’s definitely worth dealing with, as quite a lot of work obviously has been put into what’s likely to be 6.1 rather soon:

• Issue 44035 is likely to be fixed, making it easier to share NetBeans projects around, including libraries and additional code they possibly use. So far, getting, say, started with a NetBeans project on a different machine and/or a different version of NetBeans on the same machine prove to be difficult once in a while if the project used libraries not known to the IDE library manager. Maybe the changes introduced in 6.1 even make one give up on maven2 for doing dependency management - let’s see…
• Support for Java Bean Patterns is back in 6.1. Though being a feature available in earlier releases, this seemingly got lost somewhere on the way to 6.0 and has caused quite some discussion ever since. Overally, it’s good to see this feature is back to the IDE…
• The tooling for working with the Spring framework has seen some massive improvements. Initially built as a third-party module, it seems the code of spring-netbeans is now part of the official distribution (or at least an official add-on) and comes with a set of useful features, classpath and code-completion for Spring’s XML configuration files being the most notable one in my opinion. Though Eclipse’s SpringIDE still does better in terms of features and performance (code completion in a decently sized applicationContext.xml is ranging somewhere between “somewhat slow” and “unusable”), this is an important first step to ease NetBeans adoption by those used to doing their work based on Spring. And it seems there’s a growing amount of people who do so…
• It seems that tweaking performance has been a major field of work on the way to 6.1… Though I experienced the IDE “hangin’” just in very few situations (like dealing with large JSP files), I couldn’t help noticing that 6.1 prereleases (a) start up faster and (b) seem to get everyday things just done faster than stable 6.0. Surely a good thing. :)
• NetBeans 6.1 is likely to offer somwhat tight integration of MySQL database, which comes as no surprise given that Sun acquired MySQL AB just a while ago. I am torn about that: Given that the NetBeans services / database manager is amazingly good at dealing with generic RDBMS using JDBC and a homogenous interface not introducing any db-specific dependencies, this seems to be definitely a step back. Then again, it’s a good way helping the IDE being adopted by users heavily relying upon the MySQL database, possibly using some sort of LAMP software stack, who by now are provided with a well-integrated, comfortable working environment.

So, after all: I switched to 6.1 prerelease builds for doing productive work in early January, and while watching the IDE grow better and better, I am sure that 6.1, once released, is likely to push forth a movement tendency already seen with earlier stable NetBeans releases. Not much more than that to say: Have a look at the release notes, get it, get work done. Now if I only figured out how to disable that “transparency” effect while moving NetBeans windows around… :)

For the first time in 2008, the Solaris Express Developers Edition has seen an updated release which is available both for download (*.iso and VMWare image) and as a DVD kit to be ordered free of charge directly from Sun. Looking at the features list, SXDE 1/08 seems to be right the OS for everyone mainly into development work as the distribution comes packed with a whole load of servers, programming languages, SQL databases and of course the latest release of NetBeans IDE. Maybe this is not that much of interest given that most of the up-to-date GNU/Linux distributions actually do provide a similar set of tools and features, one thing makes this release worth looking at, to me: Making my way through the ‘Sun Device Detection Tool’, it seems that by now I am finally able to use most of the hardware in my notebook with a recent Solaris release:

Pretty good, now I’m waiting for the DVD to get started. :) Elsewhere, next to this, one of my virtual machines right now is installing Nexenta Core Platform, an attempt to build an Ubuntu/Debian like Unix distribution around the OpenSolaris kernel, which also has seen its first stable release just by now. Overally, (Open)Solaris seems to be gaining momentum once again, which is a good thing. Looking forward for things to come…

Being into writing XML documents as well as XML schema definitions once in a while during my work days, so far I’ve enjoyed playing around with the Eclipse XML authoring tools, and by now after moving elsewhere I had to find my home in NetBeans 6.0 also in terms of XML authoring and support.

Which, to draw a conclusion first, is exceptionally pleasant talking about the things usually involved in my case. First off, creating XML Schema descriptions: NetBeans does offer three more or less different editing views on .xsd file types, each one of them possibly made to meet different needs.

Obviously, there is a source code editor…

… letting you manually build your XSD file by hacking the right things to the right place and hoping for the best. On the other end of the scale, there is a fully-fledged visual XSD studio…

… allowing for editing the same description in a way both visually rather appealing and rather handy as well - adding attributes and elements using keybindings here is same as easy as using that pointing device of your choice. My favorite editor, however, is somewhere in between:

The “Schema” view sort of reminds me of good old NeXTStep / GNUStep / Mac OS file manager, which is possibly a good thing, and so far fits best my personal likes in terms of XML schema creation as it seems most concise to me. This way, creating (and actually maintaining…) more complex XSD rules becomes rather easy.

Creating an XML document from an XSD description is same as easy, though I have to mention that, in direct comparison, NetBeans does lack a visual XML editor… a shortcoming, however, which is compensated by offering XSL transformation support out of the box, a feature I just found in Eclipse using an old (unsupported) plugin which works just more or less in newer releases. This as well as the checking / validation features makes the NetBeans XML support overally a very handy and usable tool fulfilling most if not all of my daily XML authoring needs. Now if I only could figure out how to create XSD and XML files in an arbitrary folder using the “Favorites” view… :)

More on that, however, to be found in the NetBeans 6.0 knowledge base.