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OpenSolaris and NetBeans Featured at CommunityOne
5/5/2008
"Until now, the only choice the Amazon developer community had was Linux," said Juan Carlos Soto, vice president of global market development and engineering. "This also gives OpenSolaris developers more options for running their code in cloud computing environments."
The first OpenSolaris-EC2 services will be available to developers in private beta, accessible via invitation only, Soto said.
"This is the first time we've ever had Solaris in any kind of scale on the Amazon environment, and we really want to make sure we deliver the best experience possible," he said. "We'd rather go a bit slower and get it right, but we'll open it up to any Amazon EC2 developer, soon."
A few companies are already offering their solutions via Amazon Machine Images for OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2, including GigaSpaces, Rightscale, Thoughtworks and Zmanda.
NetBeans 6.1 and PHP Support
Meanwhile, the NetBeans community is set to roll out NetBeans 6.1 today. This version of the IDE includes some new features for developing AJAX Web apps using JavaScript. It also provides tighter integration with the MySQL database, which Sun recently acquired.
At the same time, Sun and the NetBeans community are jointly announcing an early access build of new support within the NetBeans IDE for the PHP scripting language. The feature is designed to give so-called Web 2.0-style developers a reason to consider the open source IDE, said Gregg Sporar, Sun's technical evangelist on the NetBeans project.
"Historically, NetBeans was an IDE for Java developers only," Sporar said. "But that has been changing for several years. This PHP support is a continuation of that trend. This is another community that we want to allow to leverage the features and functionality that we've got for developers using Java, C/C++, Ruby, JavaScript and others."
The population of PHP developers has grown rapidly in the past few years, thanks to the popularity of dynamic Web 2.0 applications. By some estimates, they now number in the millions.
NetBeans 6.0, released in December of last year, included support for the dynamic language Ruby and the Rails framework (Ruby on Rails) for the first time.
"After we did that, I'd talked to Ruby developers who had never even considered NetBeans," Sporar said. "They had no interest in the IDE because we simply didn't address their needs. Adding this support to NetBeans allows us to bring these tools to a much larger audience."
A download of NetBeans 6.1 is available now at the NetBeans community Web site.
John K. Waters is a freelance journalist and author based in Palo Alto, CA.
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