OpenSolaris is a rapidly evolving operating system with roots in Solaris 10, suitable for deployment on laptops, desktop workstations, storage appliances, and data center servers from the smallest single-purpose systems to the largest enterprise-class systems. The growing OpenSolaris community now has hundreds of thousands of participants and users in government agencies, commercial businesses, and universities, with more than 100 user groups around the world contributing to the use and advancement of OpenSolaris. New releases of OpenSolaris become available every six months, with contributions from both Sun engineers and OpenSolaris community members; this book covers the OpenSolaris 2008.11 release.

Pro OpenSolaris was written to demonstrate that you can host your open source applications and solutions on OpenSolaris, taking advantage of its advanced features such as containers and other forms of virtualization, the ZFS file system, and DTrace. It’s assumed that you are already fairly knowledgeable about developing on Linux systems, so the authors give an overview of the similarities and differences between Linux and OpenSolaris, and then present details on how to use the Service Management Facility (SMF), ZFS, zones, and even a bit of DTrace. They also provide pointers to the many project communities associated with new OpenSolaris features. Special focus is given to web development using familiar applications such as Apache, Tomcat, and MySQL, along with the NetBeans IDE, and showing you how to exploit some of OpenSolaris’s unique technologies.