Express Delivery
Oracle Solaris 11 Express makes significant improvements
to the application development lifecycle.
In this issue, Oracle Technology Network System Admin and Developer Community
lead Rick Ramsey pinch-hits for me once again
and fills us in on Oracle Solaris 11 Express.
WHY UPGRADE?
By now you’ve probably noticed a button for
Oracle Solaris 11 Express in the download
section of the Oracle Technology Network
Website. The software is free under the
Oracle Technology Network Developer
License. But what if you like Oracle Solaris
10 just fine? Why would you want to develop
an application for Oracle Solaris 11 Express?
The short answer is this: because you want to
deploy your application on Oracle Solaris 11
when it comes out later this year.
The major release of Oracle Solaris 11
will make installation, deployment, and
management of the operating system (OS)
and its applications much easier than before.
Another important reason to move to Oracle
Solaris 11 Express is the performance that it
will enable your application to extract from
multicore processors.
THE IMAGE PACKAGING SYS TEM
Among the numerous reasons to upgrade to
Oracle Solaris 11 Express is the new software
management infrastructure known as the
Image Packaging System, which makes both
the OS and your applications much easier
to install and update. The Image Packaging
System, which comes with multiple installers
to suit the needs of different datacenters,
automatically figures out which software
components (called “packages”) are needed
for each application or OS release to run
properly, and keeps them updated. Neither
developers nor system administrators have
DOWNLOAD Oracle Solaris 11 Express
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to spend time on that anymore.
If you are not yet ready to move to
Oracle Solaris 11 Express, Oracle’s binary
compatibility guarantee promises that your
Oracle Solaris 10–based application will run
just fine on Oracle Solaris 11. In fact, if your
application is delivered in SVR4 packages or
a tarball with scripts, you can still deploy and
manage it via the Oracle Solaris 11 Express
Image Packaging System. Use the pkgsend
command to convert your SVR4 packages or
tarball to Image Packaging System packages.
INCREASE DEVELOPER PRODUCTIVI T Y
A few years ago, the productivity of
system administrators was under scrutiny. Everybody wanted to save money on
administration. Now developer productivity
is under scrutiny. Not to worry: the virtualization improvements in Oracle Solaris 11
Express let you simulate test environments
much more quickly and cheaply.
You can spend less time figuring out the
builds, patches, and other requirements
to get your application to run on different
hardware. With Oracle Solaris 11 Express, just
build your application in one virtualized server
environment with Oracle Solaris Containers.
Use COMSTAR to make the storage available
over the network, and use Oracle Solaris ZFS to
attach your virtual server to the storage. Now
clone the virtual server on as many different
hardware platforms as you want to test, and
press Go. Once you are satisfied with how well
the application runs in that environment, you
can move it straight into production.
TAKE ADVANTAGE OF HARDWARE
The SPARC- and x86-based multicore systems
that are becoming more popular provide
tremendous increases in performance. Oracle
Solaris 11 Express makes it easier to take
advantage of that enhanced performance. For
instance, the features in Release 12. 2 of the
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Oracle Solaris Studio integrated development
environment can identify portions of your
application that would provide greater
performance if they were distributed across
different CPUs and can even automatically
change the code for you. Your multicore
performance improvements begin when you
run your C, C++, Java, or Fortran applications
developed for Oracle Solaris 10 on a multicore
system, whether it’s running Oracle Solaris
10 or Oracle Solaris 11 Express. They increase
when you recompile them to run on Oracle
Solaris 11—and reach their full potential when
you rewrite them with Oracle Solaris Studio.
Oracle Solaris 11 Express adds DTrace
probes for CPU, network layers, hard drives,
and more. The CPU probes, in particular,
become more relevant as more applications
are deployed across multiple CPUs in
multicore systems. Likewise, the networking
and hard drive probes may uncover
performance bottlenecks in virtual networks
and attached storage. Since Oracle Solaris
10, DTrace has made it possible to tune for
optimal application performance on each
particular hardware platform. DTrace lets you
root out performance bottlenecks in real time,
not only within the layers of your stack, but in
the interactions between them.
There are many more new features in
Oracle Solaris 11 Express. Get all the details
on the product page at bit.ly/eiI T1g.
WEB LOCATOR
System Admins and Developers Home Page
oracle.com/technetwork/systems
Oracle Solaris Studio Product Page
bit.ly/gzdUgB
Oracle Solaris 11: What’s New for Application
Developers (White Paper)
bit.ly/fmIvWu
Oracle Solaris 11 Express Forum
for Developers
bit.ly/ftPbnN
