Sun Enhances Solaris Developer Edition, Adds Support

Published: September 27, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Seeking to make it easier for developers to use Solaris instead of Linux or Windows for their primary workstation environment, Sun Microsystems and the contributors to the OpenSolaris project continue to tweak the Unix variant to get it up to snuff with other GUI-enabled operating systems. This week's Solaris Express Developer Edition 9/07 snapshot moves Sun another couple of yards closer to its goal.

In the Sun parlance that predates the OpenSolaris project, an Express Edition is a set of Solaris beta code that the company releases to enthusiasts to give them an opportunity to kick the tires and help debug before it goes commercial. In the wake of the OpenSolaris project, which develops and provides the source code to the Solaris 10 operating system, Sun continues to use Express Editions as a means of providing binary code to particular sets of customers, even though the code may not be fully cooked. Solaris Express Developer Edition, which first shipped in March and which was updated in June, is the set of code that Sun rolls up specifically for the application developers it is trying to court as its Solaris evangelists. Express Developer Edition includes Sun's middleware, its Studio compliers, its NetBeans integrated development environment, and other tools that developers want, such as a snazzy graphical user interface. And because developers increasingly work on X64 machines instead of RISC/Unix boxes when they code applications these days, Solaris Express Developer Edition only runs on X64-based machines, not Sparc boxes. (Sun does offer an analogous set of Solaris 10 plus development tools called Solaris Community Edition for Sparc-based workstations and servers.)

With Express Developer Edition 9/07, which became available this Monday, Sun is making power management features commonly integrated into laptops work better, since a lot of programmers prefer to use a laptop as their primary development workstation these days. The second release in July also offered improved wireless support in laptops, and now the 9/07 update supports Intel's Enhanced SpeedStep Technology power management. Sun has added more wireless chipsets to its supported list of iron with this update, too, no doubt because of its recent partnership with Intel.

More significantly, the Express Developer Edition now has a brand new installer, one that is driven by a graphical user interface and that is far more intuitive than the ancient installer that has been at the heart of Solaris, relatively unchanged, for the past dozen years. (This is the first update to the installer since Solaris 8, which was just a modified version of the installer that had some screens chopped out for simplification.) This new installer will not be cast into Solaris 10 right now, but is expected to be part of the "Project Indiana" rollup of OpenSolaris, which goes into beta in early 2008 and which will ship as a finished product sometime before the first half of 2008 is over, if all goes well.

The Dynamic Tracing (D-Trace) feature of Solaris, which provides telemetry on running applications to help coders tune and debug running code, also has a new GUI, called D-Light. D-Trace is one of the more useful software technologies that has come out with Solaris 10, but giving it a GUI will make it accessible to younger programmers who do not necessarily think in a command line. (Presumably D-Light will make it into the real Solaris at some point to cut system administrators a break.) The overall Solaris system is also getting a refresh of the Gnome GUI, moving up to the Gnome 2.18 interface. Dan Roberts, director of Solaris, OpenSolaris, and database marketing at Sun, is not sure when Sun will get to Gnome 2.20, which was just released and is now being incorporated into various Linuxes.

Solaris Express Developer Edition 9/07 includes Sun's Studio 12 C, C++, and Fortran compilers, the NetBeans 5.5 IDE, the latest "Glassfish" Java Application Server, Java Platform Standard Edition 6, and the PostgreSQL 8.2.4 relational database with support for D-Trace probes. This time around, Sun is also throwing in the open source BCC 0.16.77 C compiler (Bruce's C Compiler) for X86 architectures, and updating the Tcl and Tk programming languages, which are used to create GUIs.

All of the Solaris container improvements that became available a few weeks ago in the 8/07 update of Solaris 10 are in the new Express Developer Edition. This includes support for the "Project Janus" Linux containers, for quad-core X64 processors, and various networking enhancements.

Finally, Sun is also expanding its Solaris support contracts so customers who want their programmers to use Express Developer Edition can get phone-based support by acquiring a normal Solaris 10 support contract, which starts at $240 per year for a one- or two-socket machine. Sun was already offering email-based support for Express Developer Edition for $49 per incident or $249 per year for unlimited incidents. But some developers like to have a voice to talk to in real time, and now a Solaris 10 contract can be used to provide installation and configuration support for Express Developer Edition as well as the freely distributed binaries for Solaris 10 on X64 and Sparc iron. Developer Edition is not patched like Solaris 10 is, so this does not include patches and updates. You just get the next Developer Edition rollup every few months and upgrade to get current. If customers have a Solaris 10 server under a basic support contract, then they can tuck phone support for installation and configuration for Developer Edition under that license and not pay any additional fees.

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