Operating Systems and Web Apps

Once applications become increasingly web based, the operating system, and its compatibility with applications becomes less and less important. Instead, the compatibility issue falls the the browsers used. Thus as long as the browser is written for the operating system that is compatible with the the web application, a number of operating systems could be used to access the application.

Why Important?

This is important because for quite sometime, Microsoft has been using the fact that applications run on their operating system to limit choice in the marketplace. This Microsoft API is what locked many consumers and businesses from buying Microsoft regardless of whether they found merit in the operating system.

Who Benefits?

Well its not Microsoft. One obvious beneficiary is Apple. However, this also means that small OSs can develop (similarly to how Linux developed, only with fewer hurdles as Linux developed prior to online apps). This could make for a very interesting time for operating systems, and can allow for small niche players to be successful, even without a large installed base. The example we give is Opera. Opera Browser is a very good brower that can run on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. However, it has something like 1% of the brower market. Although it is small, it is still a successful browser with a passionate following. In fact, for some time, Internet Explorer had over 90% of the browser market locked up. Now that people see that different browsers like Firefox can run on any type of of operating system, and that they are superior to Internet Explorer, IE marketshare has significantly erroded. This is what could happen to the operating system market under a scenario where applications are run from the web, rather than from the computer.

VMWare Fusion for Mac

VMWare Fusion Experience

I have been playing with VMWare Fusion for a few weeks now. I am blown away by what I can do. I have around 7 virtual machines on my Mac. I was installing SAP and ran into problems, so I just dumped that 2003 instance, and imported a copy I had made and started over. Furthermore, Windows starts up faster on Mac than natively. It has not crashed yet and is easily the most reliable backup method (i.e. copying the machine) I have ever seen. Windows is in my future, but I don’t think it will be natively installed anymore, I will only virtualize it. Its just an API to programs now. Very cool stuff.

Most of the virtual machines below are just backups of each other. When installing complex software, backups are critical. The ability to start fresh can save many hours.

My virtual machines:

(once copied it needs to be imported into VMWare) Just like so.

It will then appear on the VMWare GUI

The Bigger Picture

What VMWare Fusion allows is for companies to begin migrating away from Windows as a platform. OS X can now be the platform and Windows can fall back to becoming an interface to programs. Companies that do this will see a massive increase in productivity, worker satisfaction, increased uptime and many other benefits. The research on TCO, productivity and user satisfaction with the Mac platform is incontrovertable. VMWare Fusion is still relatively new (as of this post April 2008), so it is not yet on the radar of many companies, but eventually it will be. So technically, the monopoly on operating systems by Microsoft has been broken. However, it will take people time to figure this out. There is always a lag between what technology can do, and people’s ability to uptake a new technology.

VMWare Tips

Once you begin using VMWare you will most probably find yourself making multiple copies of various operating systems. One issue becomes the installation of basic software. The best way we have found to deal with this is to copy things you want to install to a centralized directory and name it accordingly so you can find it when you need to install software again. Below you can see the Windows software that we have centrally located.

Applications

One thing to note, while Firefox and many other applications can be installed from a folder on the Mac (which appears within VMWare as a shared network folder) Oracle will not install this way. Its still useful to have it downloaded, but you will need to copy it to the C: drive of the Virtual Machine you will want to install it in.

Finally, its good to make copies of Virtual Machines once you have installed the basic software on them so you don’t need to continually reinstall software when you create new Virtual Machines.

OS Selections

Something to be wary about is using Vista as a Virtual Machine. Vista has not advantage over Server 2003 and its download is a pain from the Microsoft website (where the trial Server 2003 download is pretty straightforward). Furthermore, Vista is immense. Its install is around 33 GB and it provides no extra ability to run programs over 2003. Due to its size, making copies of Vista Virtual Machines is a problem. 2003 on the other hand is quite tidy. As you can see from the screenshot, this 2003 Virtual Machine with Oracle installed on it is still only about 5.28 GB, therefore there is no problem keeping a number of multiple copies of 2003 Virtual Machines on your computer.

2003 with Oracle 10g (with no data imported), JDK, JRE, TOAD and Tomcat still does not break 10GB.

By comparison look at the size of Vista. What is Microsoft doing taking up all that extra space? Hmmmmm….it makes one wonder who is managing development up in Redmond.

Application Virtualization

Here VMWare is doing something very interesting with application virtualization. This would mean that applications could be centrally installed and would not need to be installed on any particular machine. There screencam of this here out at this link:

http://www.vmware.com/whatsnew/thinstall.html#

Java SDK Installation UnNecessary on OS 10

Installing Java is necessary for running a number of applications, at least on Windows. The installation instructions link is listed below.

For Windows

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/install-windows.html

For Mac on OS 10, Java come preinstalled so no installation is necessary. See the link below for details on this.

http://developer.apple.com/java/

Text Editor for OS X and UNIX Mac Links

Once you begin using UNIX on Mac you begin to have the need for a text editor for Mac. The BASH shell along with a good text editor and you are on your way using UNIX on Mac.

We just wanted to include a link for what is we think the best text editor for Mac. Its called Smultron

http://smultron.sourceforge.net/

Here is a screenshot of it below. If has a number of advanced features over the text editor that ships standard with OS X. There are:

1. Multi file management
2. Coloring of the text for enhanced readability
3. Statistics at the bottom of the application window
4. The ability to set certain text as comment
5. A host of advanced text editing and management features

The sample file here is SQL, for which it is equally good at managing. It provides far more capability then the TOAD editor (a great tool also, but its SQL Editor is just not in the same ballpark).

TextMate

This is an exceedingly powerful text editor. Actually to call it a text editor is an understatement. TextMate’s includes a database of text libraries and rules called “bundles.” This allows the user to tell TextMate what it is writing in and for TextMate to color the text correctly and help in formatting it. Like Smultron, it can be integrated with the BASH shell.

We do not have the time or inclination to describe TextMate too fully, however, if you fell a bit limited by your current text editor and need something very sophisticated, TextMate is a clear choice.

Also some good books for learning UNIX on Mac are:

http://www.amazon.com/Unix-Mac-OS-10-4-Tiger/dp/0321246683/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209735438&sr=1-4

http://www.amazon.com/Mac-OS-Command-Line-Under/dp/0782143547/ref=pd_sim_b_img_1

Great Mac UNIX websites are:

http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/mac/2002/10/22/macforunix.html

http://xanana.ucsc.edu/~wgscott/xtal/wiki/index.php/Unix_and_OS_X:_The_Absolute_Essentials

OS X: Enterprise Ready Out of the Box

Something many people do not understand is that OS X is far more ready than Windows to run heavy duty applications. OS X is UNIX. The GUI is the front end, but the commands are eventually translated to UNIX. Whereas Windows requires Cygwin to emulate UNIX, OS X is UNIX.

Secondly, OS X comes with Apache Web Server. Windows requires the installation of a webserver. A brilliant product called MAMP allows you to use the existing OS X Apache Web Server and autoconnect it to MySQL. Litterally, MAMP does all the config and setup. It shows the server and database connections in simple terms. See the screenshot below.

I am unaware of any product like this for Windows….and would be surprised if it existed. One of the things that really should happen is the simplification of web server setups. It is currently far to complex to setup web servers and to redirect them to different databases. If only MAMP was ported to Oracle, Oracle for Mac combined with Apache already standard on Mac could allow for an easy setup of Oracle and Apache on Mac. Hopefully this comes to pass.

Java on Mac

Furthermore, Java SDK is part of the OS X install, so there is no installation necessary.

More to follow on these subjects.

There is a more detailed article on MAMP over on the MACIDEAS blog.

http://macideas.wordpress.com/2008/04/18/mysql-and-wordpress-and-mamp-on-mac/

The MAMP website is here:

http://www.mamp.info/en/mamp.html

SQL Developer for Mac

One of the important issues is having tools available that help support administering data and applications. One of the most important tools in this area is TOAD. TOAD is a front-end which allows administering a database. It comes in MySQL, Oracle and other versions.

The bad news is that TOAD is not available for Mac. However, the good news is that SQL Developer (from Oracle) is. See this link and try to download it yourself. Before you do of course you will need to have Oracle installed, any version after 9i will do.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/sql_developer/index.html

UNIX for Mac

Placeholder for a future article

Important exerpt

“Unlike Cygwin, a unix emulator that can be grafted onto the Microsoft Windows operating system, Darwin is the fundamental core of the Mac OS X operating system. The whole of Mac OS X is thus a superset of unix; the Aqua graphical user interface (GUI) of OS X provides an aesthetically pleasing and functionally elegant mechanism by which the user can control the computer via the underlying unix operating system using mouse clicks in application windows rather than typing cryptic unix commands.”

Oracle for Mac

One of the biggest issues stopping Mac from being accepted in the enterprise was its inability to run Oracle. While databases like MySQL and ProgressSQL are very good and popular for personal users and for specialized applications, Oracle has become the standard in the corporate market. For instance, we wanted to recently port an application database to MySQL, however, there are a number of triggers and PL/SQL (which is really part of the application logic) which would not port properly to a non-Oracle database. Luckily, Oracle offers non-commercial user databases for free download off the internet. A few of our complaints against Oracle are:

1. Oracle is touted for handling massive volumes, however many test databases do not need this functionality or overhead, yet need to run Oracle for other compatibility reasons (as those outlined above)
2. Oracle SQL is nowhere near as direct as SQL for MySQL or other alternatives

However, as we said, many business apps are written to only work on Oracle. However, Oracle is ported to the Mac in version Oracle 10.2. Apache comes standard on OS X, Cygwin (the UNIX emulator) should not need to be installed because UNIX is the and agnostic browsers (they don’t care what operating system they run on) like Safari and Firefox and Opera allow you to being able to bring corporate apps to run on OS X natively.

The difficulty is that there are configuration changes that come with porting to OS X and this means that you can not simply follow the installation manual, but need to be technical enough to essentiallly figure out the install yourself. We will be testing the porting of an Oracle-Tomcat-Cygwin install to Mac running on Oracle and will document our problems and successes on this blog in future posts.

See these link for details.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/macos/index.html

http://www.oreilly.com/pub/ct/49

http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/unix.html