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In this week's edition of opentalk | newsbytes, Horizon's weekly newsletter for the Sun community, you can find a link to a two-part Flash introduction and demo of NetBeans IDE 5.5 by Roman Strobl. Check it out if you'd like to learn more about the GUI Builder, Ant, Profiler, NetBeans Platform and localisation support, NetBeans Mobility pack, NetBeans Enterprise pack and NetBeans Visual Web pack, among other things.

And that brings me to today's excellent step-by-step tutorial, kindly written by the Visual Web Pack Tutorials Team: Developing a Web Application with NetBeans Visual Web Pack 5.5.

It will get you started with the Visual Web pack 5.5, so definitely worth having a look.

Happy coding and developing!

» View Tutorial: Developing a Web Application
» Download NetBeans IDE 5.5
» Read opentalk | newsbytes, Issue 10

There is an interesting article by Rick Weisner on sun.com about the use of kstat and libkstat APIs to extract metrics from the Solaris OS. The alternative is a system() call to run a script or external program to extract these metrics, but for performance reasons, you should avoid it. Instead, you should use the appropriate APIs. Have a look at Rick's article and see how the use of kstat and libkstat can make your code faster, cleaner and better.

» View PDF: Using kstat From Within a Program in the Solaris OS

There's actually an excellent guide on the subject by Joe McCabe on sun.com.

Using PHP on Sun Java System Web Server

Whether you want to install the PHP engine as a CGI programme, FastCGI Server or NSAPI Plugin -- all the information on how to install and use PHP with your Sun Java System Web Server is there.

Six levels...

Countless pitfalls...

Bugs around every corner...

No, this isn't an "Indiana Jones" movie, nor the upcoming "Hellgate: London" FPS/RPG, but a new interactive game designed by Sun Microsystems, which promises to be a worthy challenge for developers worldwide. It's called Temple of The Sun and apparently the Sun Studio software and Solaris Express Developer Edition are the keys to completing the ultimate challenge and finishing the game.

And to reward you for your efforts, there are real-life treasures to be won in the form of cash and prizes -- with a top prize of $5,000 (USD).

www.sun.com/templeofthesun

So good luck and happy coding! :)

Let's finish the week with some more Java tips...

If you've ever wondered whether you could use the hardware cryptographic accelerator in Sun's CoolThreads servers, or share cryptographic keys and public key certificates between Java applications and native applications on Solaris, the answer is yes. And Sun Expert Vincent Ryan isn't just telling us it's possible, he's also showing us how.

Check out his "XPert: Configuring Java Apps to Use Solaris Security" Q&A to find out how you can configure a Java application to make use of the hardware cryptographic accelerator available in Sun's CoolThreads servers, or share cryptographic keys and public key certificates between Java applications and native applications on the Solaris OS, or sign a JAR file using a keypair from the default PKCS#11 keystore in the Solaris OS.

» View Q&A -- XPert: Configuring Java Apps to Use Solaris Security

More Java SE 6 today. And for good reason, Java SE 6 has many new features, enhancements and improvements -- like better GUI performance and better handling of the behavior of GUI applications, as well as improvements and new features in server-side core and Java core.

Sun has published a two-part article on the new and updated desktop features in Java SE 6 -- it's a compilation of various articles and blog entries originally posted on sun.com. It's quite comprehensive and you'll get a good understanding of why the new version of Java SE will help you develop better and faster. Check it out:

» New and Updated Desktop Features in Java SE 6, Part 1
» New and Updated Desktop Features in Java SE 6, Part 2

And if you haven't made the move yet...

» Download Java SE 6

There's an excellent article on the Sun Developer Network about how the SwingWorker class in Java SE 6 can help you create and manage worker threads that improve your user interface performance.

If you're in the business of developing desktop applications, it's definitely something worth having a look!

» View the article

When Java software developers want to create a desktop application in the Solaris OS, they need to create an application that will integrate well with the existing GNOME desktop. This application need to share the same native look and feel as the desktop theme, use the native system dialogs, use the native configuration engine and in every respect look and behave like a native GNOME desktop application.

There are a number of choices available to developers. They can use an application framework such as Swing, which is part of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) or the SWT framework provided by Eclipse. However, if they are already GNOME developers and familiar with Glade/GTK-based development, then they will have to learn yet another framework, which can of course be very time consuming.

The Java GNOME bindings offer another alternative. This is a set of Java bindings for the GNOME platform libraries and the Cairo 2D drawing engine from freedesktop.org. The bindings allow GNOME and GTK+ applications to be written in the Java programming language, making use of Java Native Interface (JNI) support to bridge between Java technology and the underlying native GNOME platform and Cairo C libraries.

If you'd like to learn more about Java GNOME bindings, check out John Rice's article on the subject on sun.com at:
developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/java_gnome/

(Note: The bindings are available as part of Solaris Express, Developer Edition 2/07)

This is detailed quite well in the following document on sun.com: System Administration Guide: Naming and Directory Services (DNS, NIS, and LDAP).

Look in particular at the section on PAM.

Hope this helps.

Sun is giving away OpenSolaris Starter kits for x86 systems. Inside the kit you'll find tutorials, documentation and two DVDs filled with useful software:

• Solaris Express — Preview future features of Sun's Solaris Operating System.
  Also inside: ZFS, DTrace, Containers, and hundreds of other unique features.
• Live CDs — These bootable images allow you to check out community-built distributions of OpenSolaris, each with unique features:
  - Nexenta OS
  - BeleniX
  - SchilliX
  
• Sun Studio compilers — Get advanced features for developing applications on Sun Solaris platforms.
  
• OpenSolaris source code.

Get started using OpenSolaris technology -- right on your laptop or home PC.

To get you free OpenSolaris Starter Kit, go to get.opensolaris.org

This is a very interesting screencast if you'd like to learn to debug JavaScript using DTrace.

DTrace can examine JavaScript code execution in realtime, allowing you to identify performance issues and bugs. By using DTrace for JavaScript debugging, all sofware layers in the system can be examined from the same tool, such as the software of the browser and the kernel. For example, DTrace may help you prove that a performance issue is actually a bug in the browser - and not your JavaScript code.

» View screencast

Check out this interesting screencast in which Tom Erickson, creator of Chime and the Java DTrace API, shows you how how easy it is to create live graphs of your own DTrace programs, complete with viewable documentation and active drilldown!

Tom built and ran this Chime demo on his desktop AMD Opteron system running Solaris Nevada build 57 with Java 5 (build 1.5.0_10-b03) using the Java DTrace API.

» View screencast

If you're an online game developer, you may have heard that Sun is open sourcing Project Darkstar -- an enterprise grade, highly scalable, online game server entirely written in Java. This is big news for online game developers, MMORPG developers in particular. And NCsoft, the company behind "City of Heroes" and "Guild Wars" is already prototyping new games on the Darkstar platform.

In a nutshell, Project Darkstar is a game agnostic platform that allows developers to quickly develop online games in any genre and target a wide variety of devices. It provides developers with a simple programming model -- with plug-in APIs to facilitate expansion and integration with third-party components. The platform also enables games to handle large numbers of clients, while providing low-latency response times. It automatically handles persistence of game state and recovery of game state in the event of server failure. And It makes "shardless" MMOGs a reality by removing the need to preallocate servers with fixed assignments to specific game regions. One last thing about the Darkstar platform is that it can be reused from one game to another...

If you'd like to learn more, check out www.projectdarkstar.com.

And if you're an online game developer, visit the above website and sign up for the Darkstar Playground. Sun is offering access to server resources to help you start developing your online games. If you qualify, you will be able to quickly test your game ideas and implement online games without the worry of building a dedicated server room.

The Darkstar Playground will be available in mid-2007, so sign up today!

Sun has published a very interesting 14-page article on the process of developing applications on Solaris and Linux, which covers developing nonnative applications, making existing Linux applications run on the Solaris OS and porting applications from Linux to the Solaris OS. That's one article that will get your programming juices flowing...

The article starts with why you should consider developing on these platforms. Other than being the most popular UNIX-based operating systems, both Solaris and Linux provide rich system commands, programming tools, software packages and API libraries. And that makes them good enterprise application development environments.

The article then delves into the similarities and differences between Solaris and Linux, as well as the application development issues you might encounter on both platforms.

For example -- The most common issues are related to open source software libraries. Many open source software libraries that are used in Linux are already in Solaris 10. But in some cases, you may have to source a Solaris version from the provider or you may have to rebuild the libraries from the source code and install them on Solaris. Other issues covered in this document include system API differences between Solaris and Linux, architecture-specific code and how both platforms handle multithreaded programming.

With this understanding of both platforms, the article then focuses on the following topics, with practical examples backed up with a ton of resources for you to access afterwards... So read it if you'd like to know more about:

• How to Develop Nonnative Applications
• How to Make Existing Linux Applications Run on the Solaris OS
• Porting Applications From Linux to the Solaris OS
• Application Development Environment on the Solaris OS
• Build Environment in the Solaris OS
• Packaging Applications and Deploying on the Solaris OS

» Download Article (PDF)