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!

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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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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Exploring Web Services, Part 2: The E-Mail Validation Service

In an earlier Learning Curve journal I experimented with configuring Google’s spell checker web service, knowing that web services are a powerful tool for building many kinds of web applications. I discovered that configuring them within the Creator IDE is easy through its menus and dialog boxes.

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JavaOne and Trends in the Java Framework

I learned a couple of things at JavaOne. I learned to not ask which technology will one day become the dominant programming framework, but how other technologies will one day come to integrate into the Java framework. I learned not to think of a world where all household appliances are going online, but a world where all of its people are becoming connected. In connecting the world via the Java framework, we have hopes of wiping out starvation, eradicating malaria, and saving thousands of children from dying each day.

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Building an Ajax Application with Components

During my exploration of the Java Studio Creator IDE, I have found that one thing that impresses a lot is that it helps me begin programming with new technologies fast. With drag and drop placement — and some minor coding — I can quickly become proficient in technologies such as Web services, Ajax, XML and more. This journal entry is a description of my first explorations of Ajax technology using the sample Ajax components included with Java Studio Creator.

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