Developer's Quarterdeck Log

If you run some version of Solaris at home you probably get annoyed with Sendmail complaining about an unqualified host name. There's an easy fix right here.

One of my favorite computer keyboard is the Sun Type 6. It ranks up there with the original IBM keyboards. It is a keyboard specially designed for Sun Workstations but will work with PC's running Windows. First it is a UNIX style keyboard which means the control key is next to the A key and caps lock is on the bottom row. At first this might seem awkward coming from a standard PC keyboard but after you use a ctrl key intensive application like Emacs it makes sense. One feature I really like to have in a keyboard are audio volume and mute which Type 6 keyboard has. Other features I really like are the dedicated cut, copy, and paste. I really wish this was a more common feature in all keyboards. There are a few weird keys that I still have yet to use like Compose, Alt Graph, and a blank key which I assume is meant to be user definable. Many of the special keys don't work in Windows but all of the standard keys work just fine.

I heard on the radio today is "debunking day" here in the US (seriously, it really is). So to celebrate debunking day I decided I would give it a try for Sun's Web Infrastructure Myth Busting Challenge.

This month's myth is "Sun's web solutions are proprietary". This is actually a pretty easy one to debunk from my own personal experiences. I was actually kind of surprised that this was actually a myth for the contest it seems so easy to debunk.

Awhile back I architected a website and a couple of Java Enterprise applications it was pretty much an entire Sun solution with a couple of exceptions. It ran on a Sun v120, Solaris 10 (in a zone nonetheless), and Sun Application server. The backend was Microsoft SQL server, yes a Microsoft database on Windows. Authentication was against IBM's Domino server (if you really want to know what proprietary means). I knew that in the future infrastructure requirements might change and change they did. The applications and website had to be moved from Sparc servers to Windows Servers running under VMware. One top of that the client wanted to move to JBoss if it wasn't a big deal. So off of Sun hardware, off of Sun's OS, and no longer on Sun's app server. So how much effort do you think this was? With the exception of one problem it took a couple of hours. Yes HOURS to move. I bet it would have been quicker if I knew what I was doing with JBoss. How many other companies out there make it so easy for you to move off of their platform. But I know what you are thinking, what about that one problem? That one other problem was a custom built JAAS module I had built for authentication against a Lotus Domino server. That took me about another day to rewrite the custom module. But that wasn't the fault of Sun's architecture but that of the Domino server not following the standards (now there's a company that knows how to lock you in! :-)). So even with the problem I ran into the migration was way quicker that anyone could have imagined.

Sun's web solutions are proprietary? I'd say that myth's busted.

In a couple of weeks OpenSolaris will no longer be just a hobby of mine but will be a full time endeavor. I will be a contractor for Sun working on the OpenSolaris.org website. To say that I am excited about this opportunity is an understatement.