[advocacy-discuss] OpenSolaris for Java developers?

[Sriram Narayanan]

On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 2:05 PM, Roman Strobl <Roman.Strobl at sun.com> wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> I have many contacts in the Java community so I was thinking about
> leveraging these and showing some OpenSolaris love to Java developers.
>
> I was thinking about what to present - the first thing that comes on my
> mind is DTrace and Java probes for DTrace. That's probably the best
> thing to show. I would also like to discuss Chime for DTrace. ZFS might
> be also interesting, although this is more for deployment (but maybe
> even for source snapshots, backups, etc.).
>

Here's what I do at talks in India:
- demonstrate that the Belenix KDE environment is the same familiar environment.
- show case the music and video tools
- demonstrate Wine and Lotus Notes.
- have a great and attractive desktop theme. (mention that I got it
from KDE-look.org, etc).
- run Konsonle and flip the app window around using great Compiz effects
- Have a PDF viewer, and a Word document open
- Next have links to Netbeans, Firefox and some Java JNLP application
on the desktop.

>From the Konsole terminal, start Tomcat, Launch Firefox from the
desktop link, contact the webapp, and show that Firebug runs.

Believe it or not, people need to see a familiar environment, and the
above can be shown within a minute.

Now once you establish that people can have the same familiar
environment that they're used to everywhere else, they'll be in the
mood to see what's new.

> Any other ideas or experiences with talking to Java developers - what
> else is there to make them excited about OpenSolaris?
>

Tomcat  + mysql + the IDE each running in a Zone.
Resource management per zone for the above ("Let Tomcat grab 100% CPU,
but in it's Zone.. your IDE still gets 30% minimum CPU :)")
Zones + ZFS as a mechanism to distribute demo environments and
deployments to customers/colleagues
A ZFS snapshot before we experiment and screw up the environment
(typical developer scenario!)
Build artifacts can be snapshotted using ZFS (no need to checkout code
and rebuild, no waste of disk space).
Zones can have their own IP addresses and network rules so you can
recreate the customer environment to some extent (not the same as
crossbow, though).
Run Linux within Zones for apps that need to call Linux native code.
Run Windows in a Xen/Virtual Box instance all within the same environment.

Somethings that I will try later:
- ZFS + Xen for multiple Windows instances (all sharing the same ZFS
parent and thereby reducing disk consumption)
- Crossbow to create the same environment and regular bandwidth flow..
great for recreating bandwidth constrained demos and tests.

Some guidelines that I follow:
- no criticism of Window/Linux - just doesn't help and consumes time
and distracts the audience.
- Have everything read and working. Feel no qualms about simply
pasting commands from a text editor into the command prompt. (Make
sure I tell the audience why this is a good thing).

Roman, you're great at frightening people and making them feel that
everything is the pits (I'm still impressed by your demo on the
horrors and uncertainities of multi core).. so I'm confident that with
some preparation, you'll come up with something good :)

> -Roman
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