Walter Hardy's Blog

I am constantly amazed at how stable Sun Solaris is. Since many of our company websites run on Windows 2003 with IIS, I’m very accustomed to having to reboot servers weekly, and getting early morning wake-up calls from our server watchdogs.

But Solaris–it just doesn’t quit. I had left one production Solaris 10 server running for over 360 days to the point where I was really scared to reboot it. Not because the operating system wouldn’t handle the reboot, but because the hardware just might not come back to life after a momentary loss of power. So I went down to our hosting facility to be in person during a hard reboot, and I was pleased to see it come back on-line without a hitch.

My firm hosts and maintains the student on-line training website for Sun Microsystems: www.SunStudentCourses.com. We built it on the open-source Course Management System, Moodle (moodle.org) and it runs on Solaris 10 with PHP, Glassfish application server and MySQL.

I have also hosted a collaboration system for Sun Microsystems with Sun Java Systems Instant Messaging and Directory Server, as well as a portal system with Liferay—all on Solaris. These systems rarely, if ever crash.

Solaris really is a great choice for a firm who hosts their own websites. Just the fact that operating system instances can be divided into zones on a single machine is a wonderful benefit!

I am excited to announce that we have completed the move of our hosting environment to the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, CA. This high-tech hosting environment provides us with ample room for growth with additional bandwidth, services and space.

The Plug and Play Tech Center provides both office and hosting space to over 100 startups in Silicon Valley. It provides for an environment where companies can grow, seek venture capitalists and network with each other. The collocation hosting space is first-rate and new, with multi-homed bandwidth, backup power systems and more.

In addition, we have upgraded our ColdFusion hosting environment from several single-server instances to an enterprise system where we are more easily able to launch instances and load-balance our clients’ popular, high-traffic websites.

We continue to also administer and host on Solaris, including Sun Microsystems’ student learning site, SunStudentCourses.com and their collaboration service, share.java.net. To support and host these two key web presences, we run Sun Access Manager, Directory Server, Web Server, Instant Messaging Server, the open-source application server, Glassfish, and the open-source on-line training system Moodle. We are also assisting Sun in the development of new technology for its expansive developer community using the open-source portal server, Liferay.

Relocating our servers to The Plug and Play Tech Center has been a great move for us. Not only are we able to better control costs, we are also provided with abundant high-speed bandwidth and the latest in uninterrupted hosting services. The Center allows us to more easily engage with other growing businesses in the San Francisco Bay area and Silicon Valley. The center is well networked with high-bandwidth pipes to both Yahoo and Google, allowing our Search-Engine Optimization technology to function even more efficiently.

Not too many years—or even months—ago, there was a concept to “optimize” a website for search-engine positioning. Companies existed for the sake of providing Search Engine Optimization services. For a thousand dollars or more, a firm would perform a comprehensive evaluation of a website and offer a set of recommendations on how to better optimize it for best possible search engine ranking. These recommendations may include installing a comprehensive set of Meta tags in pages, writing content to include more repetitive key words, extending the domain expiration and much more.

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Today at the huge technology conference in San Francisco, JavaOne, Sun Microsystems announced an open source initiative with Liferay, Inc. I am also glad to announce that my firm has been working with Sun this year to create a Social Networking application based on the Liferay Portal Server.

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We launched a new edition of www.GoVermont.com last week. This is a reinvention of the Vermont Travel Planner that I originally created in 1995. It has been very popular in the past and also provided lodging content to the State of Vermont through their skiing websites for many years (on www.SkiVermont.com).

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This is the first of a series of Learning Curve articles that will describe my experience of building a sample portal application. This first article is about my research. It describes my project requirements and the products I’ll use, and have used: Sun Java System Portal Server, along with related products like Java CAPS and OpenPortal. In the next article I’ll describe in detail how I installed the Sun Java System Portal Server on Solaris.

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In this article I detail how I install the Sun Java System Portal Server, Version 7.1, Update 1, on a Solaris 10 x86 Sun server. Although I run into a couple of snags, I’d like to point out how simple this process is. One of the advantages of Sun’s portal server over competitive products is that the installation process completely automates the integration of the Portal Server, Application Server, Directory Server, Access Manager and other required components. Additional information can be found in the Sun Developers Network (SDN) article: Installing Sun Java Portal Server 7.1. My article details some issues in following the above-referenced article, as it does not describe the latest release. The article above does cover the installation of Application Server 8.1 (which I do not cover here) and is a good reference for any additional information you may need during your installation process.

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Portals provide new levels of functionality and productivity for the enterprise. They allow users and groups to work together easily and securely. Why? They provide members with powerful desktop tools that ease collaboration on many levels, help manage workflow, and give developers the tools they need to build new applications.

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Accessing Production Databases and Managing Databases with the Bundled Java DB

In the last journal I explored working with the Sun Java Studio Creator bundled database. I found that the Java DB was included with the Java Studio Creator IDE and available for building my applications. The Java DB is Sun’s supported distribution of the open source Apache Derby database.

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Database Connectivity, Part 1: Working with Java DB (Derby)

Now that I’ve worked with components and consumed web services using the Java Studio Creator 2 IDE, I’m ready to learn what I can do with database integration. Mostly, I work with Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL for production and, on occasion, Microsoft Access for development. But for this first part of a two-part article, I’ll work with the Java DB (Derby), which is the database bundled with the IDE. In part two I’ll look at integrating databases for production use, such as Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL.

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